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Like it or not, Grand Juries are part of our "representative democracy". The process is neither representative nor democratic when those grand juries are made from "registered voters", when being a registered voter is increasingly made difficult by political parties.Quote:
Originally Posted by Loki
There shouldn't be an "insurmountable obstacle" to charge cops who act with reckless behavior.
Found something kinda freaky:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan...b_6858388.html
Wonder if Ferguson really is an outlier.Quote:
In the city of Ferguson, nearly everyone is a wanted criminal.
That may seem like hyperbole, but it is a literal fact. In Ferguson -- a city with a population of 21,000 -- 16,000 people have outstanding arrest warrants, meaning that they are currently actively wanted by the police.
That statistic should be truly shocking. Yet in the wake of the Department of Justice's withering report on the city's policing practices, it has gone almost entirely unmentioned. News reports and analysis have focused on the racism discovered in departmental emails, and the gangsterish financial "shakedown" methods deployed against African Americans. In doing so, they have missed the full picture of Ferguson's operation, which reveals a totalizing police regime beyond any of Kafka's ghastliest nightmares.
The Department of Justice's 102-page report is a rich source of damning facts about the Ferguson criminal justice system. But tucked halfway in and passed over quickly is a truly revelatory set of figures: the arrest warrant data for the Ferguson Municipal Court.
It turns out that nearly everyone in the city is wanted for something. Even internal police department communications found the number of arrest warrants to be "staggering". By December of 2014, "over 16,000 people had outstanding arrest warrants that had been issued by the court." The report makes clear that this refers to individual people, rather than cases, so people with many cases are not being counted multiple times. (Though clearly some of these cannot be Ferguson residents, since the number represents more than the entire adult population and Ferguson policing applies to visitors as well.) However, if we do look at the number of cases, the portrait is even starker. In 2013, 32,975 offenses had associated warrants, so that there were 1.5 offenses for every city resident.
That means that the city of Ferguson quite literally has more crimes than people.
To give some context as to how truly extreme this is, a comparison may be useful. In 2014, the Boston Municipal Court System, for a city of 645,000 people, issued about 2,300 criminal warrants. The Ferguson Municipal Court issued 9,000, for a population 1/30th the size of Boston's.
Not to disagree that these numbers are astounding, but the Boston comparison is a poor one. I know that St. Louis has one of the highest crime rates in the country. Ferguson probably has similar statistics. Boston isn't even in the same league crime-wise.
I gathered that might be the case but it's like 120 times more warrants issued on a per capita basis. For more-or-less serious crimes Ferguson is a little or moderately worse than the US average and a little worse than Boston specifically but apparently nowhere near as bad as St. Louis. I believe the DoJ found that the overwhelming majority of those warrants were for minor "offenses" that were themselves often brought on by the justice system's counter-productive and unjust actions.
It's not an outlier. You could easily find other data showing pockets of crime in any other city, or its immediate suburbs, and police ..... using fines for traffic violations to fund police actions.Quote:
Originally Posted by Aimless
I started a thread about the role of Police in the community, but it died pretty fast. :(
At least it didn't die in police custody :(Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
Interesting statistics from the video as well - if use of force declined 60% after using cameras you might just be tempted to think it used to be excessive.
Good read, and I seem to recall that link being posted already, (perhaps by Minx) a week or two ago.Quote:
Originally Posted by Loki
Could be. Vox is his thing now. :o
It's not my fault, for some reason I'm getting lots of Vox articles in my newsfeed :o
Admitting you have a problem is the first step toward recovery. :heart: