A Quote by Shaun King
Very few police officers are ever held accountable for even the most egregious shootings and acts of violence.
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I`m a former mayor. I know that being a cop is not an easy job. But when
police officers misbehave, they`ve got to be held accountable.
Police officers today are a protected class, one no politician wants to oppose. Law enforcement interests may occasionally come up short on budgetary issues, but legislatures rarely if ever pass new laws to hold police more accountable, to restrict their powers, or to make them more transparent. In short, police today embody all of the threats the Founders feared were posed by standing armies, plus a few additional ones they couldn't have anticipated.
We should start with the basics: Police officers are unlikely to be held accountable if the prosecutors investigating and potentially prosecuting them feel indebted to them.
Why wouldn't the police officers be on edge? Why wouldn't they be alert? And why wouldn't people in the community trust police officers? Because they are consistently harassing them, and they have experience with police officers doing awful things.
For police officers who commit this violence, there has been no accountability. Cops are supposed to be held to a standard of conduct, but they always get the benefit of the doubt, inherently. They act like we ain't supposed to question nothing.
When I talk to Chicagoans who live in our most violence-prone neighborhoods, they do not hate the police. In fact, they tell me they want more cops and fewer gangs. They do not want more officers in cars just driving through their communities. They want officers on the beat in their neighborhoods.
The problem is, is the White House and this administration have created a war against police officers in this country, with their allegations and false assertions that there's widespread and pervasive racism in the United States of America that lives in the heart and minds of the men and women in blue. This is a false narrative. It is dangerous. It is reckless. It has resulted in the loss of lives. They are not being held accountable.
Never once has Republican world said hey, maybe we should look into how police officers are carrying out their solemn public responsibility to serve and protect. No - no right wing website in America is investigating or will ever investigate how well police officers do their jobs.
A system in which legal police shootings of unarmed civilians are a common occurrence is a system that has some serious flaws. In this case, the drawback is a straightforward consequence of America's approach to firearms. A well-armed citizenry required an even-better-armed constabulary. Widespread gun ownership creates a systematic climate of fear on the part of the police. The result is a quantity of police shootings that, regardless of the facts of any particular case, is just staggeringly high. Young black men, in particular, are paying the price for America's gun culture.
When you have police officers who abuse citizens, you erode public confidence in law enforcement. That makes the job of good police officers unsafe.
It's so much more difficult to get police officers to testify against other police officers.
I wouldn't call it "police reform," but I would say that police procedure enhancement could be helpful - these police shootings are absolutely horrible.
As far as police go, if officers are really that scared or timid [on the streets], maybe they shouldn't be police officers. Their job is to protect and serve and they're supposed to be the bravest of the brave.
This president has been reluctant to hold anybody accountable. No one was held accountable after September the 11th. Nobody's been held accountable after the clear flaws in intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq.
American cops didn't create that atmosphere, they're the ones though who have to live with it on a daily basis. These are generalisations; you can't make generalisations about hundreds of thousands of people. The New York Police Department, for instance, has 38,000 police officers in it. But most cops, when I talk to them, desperately care about the victims of gun violence. They see it, they experience it.
The Patriot Act is the most egregious piece of legislation to ever leave Congress since the Alien and Sedition Acts, John Ashcroft and every member of Congress who voted for it should be indicted.
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