What are some legitimate ways to stop police violence and abuse

[A.R.$]

I'm sick of just wanting for the next innocent Black victim.We have to come up with a real strategy to stop this madness. Once we come up with a strategy let's work to implement it in your area.

 

[kp404]

I'm sick of just wanting for the next innocent Black victim.We have to come up with a real strategy to stop this madness. Once we come up with a strategy let's work to implement it in your area.

Some are hesitant to advocate this, but the Huey P. newton Gun Club in Dallas has been doing great things policing their neighborhood:

http://www.vice.com/read/huey-does-dallas-0000552-v22n1

 

[A.R.$]

Some are hesitant to advocate this, but the Huey P. newton Gun Club in Dallas has been doing great things policing their neighborhood:

http://www.vice.com/read/huey-does-dallas-0000552-v22n1

Yeah,
I know some people that are trying to set up Black gun clubs in their area. I think the more we can police ourselves the better.

 

[Alan Emerald]

Have to look into the Huey P. Newton gun club but i do feel self policing is a big step in the right direction. Have been thinking of ideas myself in light of all these protest. The attention gained is necessary however, im left with a now what feeling once the smoke clears.

I feel those who can (leaders, lawyers, former police, mentors) must engage as much as possible with those affected (for the most part all black youth). We have to not only police ourselves, but prepare the youth for how to maintain should they have to deal with the police. This is largely a parenting issue but the black communities have to be just that and look out for those without proper guidance.

 

[MAKAVELI25]

Know your rights. I'm going to drop a couple of helpful tips:

A stop (or an "investigative detention" Terry V. Ohio) Requires Reason Suspicion. For a police officer to be able to stop you for an investigative detention (as in you're not allowed to leave until questioning is done) he requires "specific and articulable" facts that (a.) a crime is, has, or is about to occur and (b.) YOU had something to do with it. Absent reasonable suspicion, an officer cannot LEGALLY stop you or seize you (as delineated by the 4th Amendment).

Once an officer HAS stopped you (or seized) you, he cannot frisk you (pat you down for weapons) absent reasonable suspicion that you are "presently armed and dangerous". The justification for the frisk has to be INDEPENDENT OF THE STOP

Police officers requires Probable Cause to Arrest you.

Absent exigent circumstances, a police officer cannot search your home (WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT) without a warrant. Those exigent circumstances are (a.) The escape of a felon (b.) the destruction of evidence (c.) Harm to the police or public, absent any of those, they CANNOT search your home without a warrant or your consent. DON'T EVER give them your consent, if they don't have a warrant tell them to eat a dikk

Police officers require Probable Cause to search your car. But if they stop you and have a reasonable suspicion that you are currently armed and dangerous, they can search your front and passenger seat. If they have Probable Cause they can search your ENTIRE car

Know how Miranda works. Once you're being subjected to a "custodial interrogation", they will read you your Miranda Rights

Once you have been read your Miranda rights, EXPRESSLY (not unambiguously or unequivocally) ask for a Lawyer. Ask for a Lawyer (EXPRESSLY), say you won't be speaking until you've been obliged your 6th Amendment Right to Assistance of Counsel, and they cannot re-initiate questioning until (a.) you've gotten a lawyer (b.) YOU re-initiate questioning (don't be a fukking moron). After you've asked for a Lawyer, either (a.) Don't say another words (except maybe ask for water, food, bathroom, but THAT'S it) until you've received a lawyer (b.) Expressly invoke your 5th Amendment Right Against Self Incrimination (right to silence) and do not say another word (it can be waived) until your lawyer is present

MOST IMPORTANTLY: Cops do not have to tell you that you have a right NOT to consent to any searches or seizures under the 4th Amendment. They don't have to tell you, as long as you "voluntarily" give your consent they can do whatever they want to. Know your rights! It's not always going to save you, but it's a nice tool to have in your back pocket

 

[RAX 010]

Summon our Ancestors with African spirituality ie VooDoo

 

[Detroit Wave]

 

[Fenian]

might be extreme but the way things are this may be you guys only option. I'd recommend a black version of the PIRA. who where formed to protect the irish catholic streets from assault and buring from loyalists and abuse from the british police and military.

 

[HearNoEvil]

Focused retaliation.

That's probably the nuclear option though.

 

[A.R.$]

Building a economic base and being able to buy politicians is a long term solution. Dr. Claude Anderson talks about this. This is important because it's not just the police. It's the prosecutors, and judges that let them off as well.

 

[10:31]

Sue the state


Tape them abusing their power and breaking the law

Get their badge numbers


Sue the state

 

[Blackking]

Well



What has every other group in the history universe done IN response?


There you go^^

 

[10:31]

Well



What has every other group in the history universe done IN response?


There you go^^

It's really that simple

Lawyer up and beat them at their game. These police make no money lol they have 35-50k a year jobs patrolling the streets like Batman

If they want to abuse their authority and carry out personal vendettas

Tape them
Get their information
Call a lawyer

And get paid.

Please stop running downtown to participate in Marches begging for your oppressors to treat you fair...

That in of itself makes no sense lol

 

[Handsback]

Structural changes: civilian oversight boards, new procedures involving outside prosecutors, body cameras, no incentives for bullshyt stops and seizures, no more military surplus free for alls, end the war on drugs, toss broken windows in favor of something else

Personal changes: new recruitment and hiring practices with a focus on community members; a vetting by and integration into the neighborhoods that officers will patrol; zero tolerance for racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, ect language, conduct or behavior; reduction in the war rhetoric; better vetting of recruits (psych evals and such)

In just the last two months, Michael Brown, 18, was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri; Ezell Ford, 25, was killed by a police officer in Los Angeles; Frank Alvarado, 39, was killed by a Salinas police officer; Eric Garner, 43, was killed by a New York police officer; and Marlene Pinnock, 51, was brutally beaten by a California Highway Patrol officer. All of these victims were of color, and all were unarmed.

Since these latest incidents, there has been much talk about the need for retraining officers; and there have been repeated calls from an outraged public for investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI. But training and federal investigations are ineffective responses to allegations of police misconduct. We know how to solve this epidemic; we just need to find the political will to do it.

Before they even don their uniforms, police officers receive hours and hours of training about the appropriate use of force. At the nation’s police academies, they learn how to evaluate situations where force could be an option and when it’s illegal. By the time officers are patrol-ready, they know how to use their firearms, batons, and stun guns. Yet, in response to the chokehold killing of Erin Garner, New York Police Commissioner William Bratton has called for the “retraining” of his officers. Training is, of course, essential to law enforcement. But it would be a serious and dangerous error to shrug off these deaths and beatings by cops and simply attribute them to inadequate training.

Retraining is useless when officers view people of color as “f--king animals”—the words shouted by a police officer at a crowd in Ferguson protesting the killing of Michael Brown. All of the training and retraining in the world are of no moment if officers see the people they are charged to protect and serve as subhuman and dangerous.

And while some investigations by the FBI and the Justice Department have resulted in major and positive changes to police departments, these kinds of costly inquiries frequently take years to complete. Case in point: the fatal shooting of Brown in Ferguson. The FBI has opened a civil rights inquiry in response to the public outcry, but a week after the shooting, critical information such as the name of the officer, and the number of times and where on his body Brown was shot, has not been released. This is not a training problem. It’s a transparency problem.

So, if more training and federal investigations are not the answer, what is? First, police departments must broaden the definition of reasonable use of force. In 1989 the U.S. Supreme Court in Graham v. Connor defined the reasonable use of force as force “judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, and its calculus must embody an allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second decisions about the amount of force necessary in a particular situation.” That definition has been interpreted narrowly by law enforcement agencies across the country to mean that the reasonableness of the force is limited to an examination of only the amount of force used in the moment. The conduct of officers right before the use of force is never examined. Under this definition, officers who provoke individuals and officers who escalate situations get a pass.

The definition of what constitutes the reasonable use of force must be expanded to include the circumstances leading up to the use of force, so that the inquiry into the misconduct sweeps in whatever the officer did prior to the decision to use force, along with the conduct of the victim. There is precedent for this. This year, both the Seattle Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department expanded their definitions of reasonable use of force. Now, in Seattle, officers cannot use physical force “against individuals who only verbally confront them unless the vocalization impedes a legitimate law enforcement function or contains specific threats to harm the officers or others.” And in Los Angeles, the use of deadly force must include “consideration of not only the use of deadly force itself, but also an officer’s tactical conduct and decisions leading up to the use of force when determining its reasonableness.”


Second, cities and counties must establish independent civilian oversight agencies for their law enforcement departments. Civilian oversight of law enforcement is far from novel. Worldwide, countries such as South Africa, Canada, Belgium, and the European Union have police oversight agencies. And there are numerous cities and counties in the United States that have established civilian oversight departments, from Palo Alto, California, to Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Honolulu, Hawaii. (A complete listing of all civilian oversight agencies can be found at nacole.org). In San Jose, California, where I am the independent police auditor, our civilian oversight office has existed for 21 years. The beauty of civilian oversight is that it holds police officers accountable to the public by providing independent review of complaints of police misconduct, instead of relying solely upon internal investigations in which the police investigate themselves.

The 1988 murder of 20-year-old Cara Knott by Officer Craig Peyer, a six-year veteran of the California Highway Patrol, illustrates what happens when independent civilian oversight is not a part of misconduct investigations. After stopping Knott, ostensibly for a traffic violation, Peyer made sexual advances on her. When she refused, he killed her by bludgeoning her with his flashlight, strangling her, and then tossing her body over a bridge. It turned out that a number of young women had also been the victims of Peyer’s advances. And while they had filed complaints with the CHP’s Internal Affairs Unit, the department’s internal investigations dismissed their complaints, finding in favor of Peyer. Peyer is now serving a life sentence in a California prison for Knott’s murder.

Third, and as Reihan Salam argues today in Slate, every single law enforcement officer should be required to wear body-worn cameras, or BWCs; and every single law enforcement agency should adopt a protocol for the operation of these cameras that strictly regulates when the cameras can be turned off by officers. Bystanders with cameras have changed policing forever. Witness the public outrage after the release of videos that depicted the beating of Marlene Pinnock and the chokehold death of Eric Garner. Police officers should have cameras, too.


BWCs promote transparency in policing, they hold officers and the public accountable for their actions, and they reduce civil litigation. The police department of Rialto, California, has 115 sworn officers. In 2009 it became the first known police department to utilize BWCs. A study that analyzed the use of BWCs in Rialto showed that use of force incidents dropped by 59 percent, and that civilian complaints about police misconduct decreased by 87.5 percent. Those numbers are staggering. The benefit to police and the public of recording police interactions clearly justifies its costs. Even the ACLU has concluded that BWCs assist in holding law enforcement more accountable to the communities that they serve.

Top Comment

All of these sound like good ideas. But if we really want to stop police brutality, we need cops who use grossly excessive force to go to prison for aggravated assault and battery. More...

-Rob

341 Comments Join In

Over the last decade, claims against cities and counties across the country stemming from police incidents amounted to $22 billion. The special counsel to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department recently reported that between January 2013 and April 2014, 132 cases of excessive force against the department were closed by settlements or court verdicts, totaling $12,175,000. The largest payout in fiscal 2012–2013 was a jury award of $6 million, settled by the County for $3.9 million. The plaintiff in that case claimed that two deputies escalated a traffic stop into violence, pepper-spraying him, punching him in the head, kneeing him in the face, and slamming his head into the pavement. And don’t forget the attorneys’ fees that are often a key driver in the decision of whether or not to settle or proceed to litigation. In Los Angeles County, for every dollar spent on a payout in fiscal 2012, another dollar was spent on the lawyers, amounting to $43 million. Communities policed by officers wearing BWCs will see a dramatic decrease in litigation and the costs associated with it.

All the outrage surrounding the violence against unarmed black people this summer will amount to nothing if we simply settle for more investigations and more training. There are steps we can take to reduce police violence, and they have been proved to work.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...what_we_ve_seen_after_the_michael.single.html

 

[RAX 010]

Vodun was actively suppressed during colonial times.

“Many Priests were either killed or imprisoned, and their shrines destroyed, because of the threat they posed to Euro-Christian/Muslim dominion. This forced some of the Dahomeans to form Vodou Orders and to create underground societies, in order to continue the veneration of their ancestors, and the worship of their powerful gods.”

The Affaire de Bizoton of 1864. The murder and alleged canibalization of her body by eight voodoo devotees caused a scandal worldwide and was taken as proof of the evil nature of voodoo even though the confessions that condemned the accused were obtained illegally by torture.
Vodou has often been associated in popular culture with Satanism, witchcraft, zombies and “voodoo dolls”. Zombie creation has been referenced within rural Haitian culture,but is not a part of Vodou. Such manifestations fall under the auspices of the bokor or sorcerer, rather than the priest of the Loa. The practice of sticking pins in voodoo dolls has history in folk magic. “Voodoo dolls” are often associated with New Orleans Voodoo and Hoodoo as well the magical devices of the poppet and the nkisi or bocio of West and Central Africa.

The general fear of Vodou in the US can be traced back to the End of the Haitian Revolution (1791). There is a legend that Haitians were able to beat the French during the Haitian Revolution because their Vodou deities made them invincible. The US, seeing the tremendous potential Vodou had for rallying its followers and inciting them to action, feared the events at Bois-Caiman could spill over onto American soil. Fearing an uprising in opposition to the US occupation of Haiti, political and religious elites, along with Hollywood and the film industry, sought to trivialize the practice of Vodou. After the Haitian Revolution many Haitians fled as refugees to New Orleans. Free and enslaved Haitians who moved to New Orleans brought their religious beliefs with them and reinvigorated the Voodoo practices that were already present in the city. Eventually, Voodoo in New Orleans became hidden and the magical components were left present in the public sphere. This created what is called hoodoo in the southern part of the United States. Because hoodoo is folk magic, Voodoo and Afro-diasporic religions in the U.S. became synonymous with fraud. This is one origin of the stereotype that Haitian Vodou, New Orleans Voodoo, and hoodoo are all tricks used to make money off of the gullible. [47]

The elites preferred to view it as folklore in an attempt to render it relatively harmless as a curiosity that might continue to inspire music and dance.”[48]

Hollywood often depicts Vodou as evil and having ties to Satanic practices in movies such as The Skeleton Key, “The Devil’s Advocate”, The Blair Witch Project, The Serpent and the Rainbow, Child’s Play, Live and Let Die, and in children’s movies like The Princess and the Frog.

In 2010, following the 7.0 earthquake that devastated Haiti, negative attention to Vodou also followed. One of the more notable examples would be of televangelist Pat Robertson’s televised discourse on the subject. Robertson stated that the country had cursed itself after the events at Bois-Caiman because he claimed they had engaged in Satanic practices in the ceremony preceding the Haitian Revolution. “They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.’ True story. And so the devil said, ‘Ok it’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another”.