1312 incidents of [Police Brutality] and counting
This is the thread for discussing acts of police brutality, like the title says. We hit 100 pages on the last one, so forum law says we get a new one.
Please put all videos and images of as aforementioned brutality behind spoilers with content warnings. This stuff is hard enough to talk about, let alone see.
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Well, fuck. In a just world, this would end careers.
Which is stupid, counterproductive, and tells you everything you need to know about how they view the public.
https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/daunte-wright/kim-potter-sentenced-for-shooting-death-of-daunte-wright/89-7330c69c-52b0-4f09-a1f9-7c2531adcb4f
Yeah okay, sure. The sentence you handed down really communicates the depth of your feelings on this matter, judge. We see you.
No, it exactly communicates what she's sad about. She's sad that a cop made a mistake and has consequences. She is much less concerned that an innocent person was killed.
On the other hand, you really can't be having cops shoot people by accident, irrespective of whether intentionally doing so would be justified, just as a standard of competence. If she'd successfully tazed him there very likely would have been no further injury on anyone's part.
On the gripping hand, some right-leaning lawyer commentators I've listened to seem confident the conviction will be appealed (or would be if the courts could move fast enough) on the grounds that the jury instructions were insufficient or outright misleading regarding the fact that (according to them) "recklessness" as pertaining to 1st degree manslaughter, in legal terms, necessitates that a person know what they're doing and disregard the risk of it. Per the judge, "everybody agrees" that she never intended to use her firearm and didn't even know she had it in her hand until after firing it... so she shouldn't meet the recklessness requirement. I'll be interested to see if anything comes of that.
At the end of the day Potter made a serious error that can't go unanswered. Merely ending her career in law enforcement and taking away her ability to own a firearm ever again would be unacceptably lenient, but I don't think the actual sentence is.
Maybe, unless you compare the actual sentence to, y'know, other sentences for ostensibly lesser offenses.
Five years for casting a provisional ballot while on parole, because you were incorrectly told you could do so.
Twelve years for attempting to sell $31 worth of pot - a first offense.
I could go on, but I feel the point has already been made.
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Those are quite fucked. Don't you think excessively long sentences are an issue in America? Two wrongs don't make a right.
In fact, since she's given so much extra training and responsibility as a LEO, she should be held to a higher standard, not a lesser one.
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But one wrong, consistently applied to a group of people, and not applied to another group of people, is tyranny
Only way we see real calls for change from people who usually oppose it (see Republicans re jail/bail conditions) is when middle/upper class white people are subjected to it.
As long as it's just the poor and/or minorities suffering, they at best couldn't give a shit, at worst, they're actively cheering it on.
Want to see police reform? Have police treat middle/upper class white people the same as they do poor minorities, and it'll be changed in weeks.
Well you've missed the point entirely if you think that I'm advocating for an excessively long sentence for this former police officer killing someone.
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More specifically, five years for casting a provisional ballot after the probation officer signed paperwork saying parole was up. The judge basically just decided she had lied to him in some way and was thus guilty, absent any evidence. It's egregious even in the context of a racist as fuck system.
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Yeah, 16 months versus 86 for the standard (or 180 for the maximum), is incredibly light.
There's a difference between lenient, just, and harsh, and you might not agree with the 15 year maximum, or the 7 year average, but less than two for the taking of a life, especially by a law enforcement officer, is in no way just.
Excuse me for assuming. If I've missed the point, it's because you haven't actually made one. Also, I don't think you're advocating for an excessively long sentence. I don't think you've advocated for anything at all so far in this thread. You're welcome to do so.
What duration of time would you consider appropriate? The disparity with the 7 year average is because 1st degree manslaughter generally involves malice, as Judge Chu noted. It's also, though Judge Chu said nothing about factoring this in, generally not committed in an attempt to apprehend a criminal who is presently endangering the lives of both civilians and law enforcement.
I think it is also worth noting that the police officer who killed Duante in April 2021 has spent, in the last 9 months, less than 2 of those in jail.
Nah, the point being made is that white supremecy means cops upholding white supremecy gets lighter sentences than other people. The fact you refuse to acknowledge or at least recognize that point isn't on DarkPrimus, it's all on you
Which is a proper and just state, because people shouldn't serve a substantial sentence before they're convicted absent strong flight risk or imminent danger to the public. As long as she's not wearing a badge, the latter doesn't apply. Holding people for the bulk of a year pre-trial...often as part of a tactic to force a plea deal...is an injustice that should be fixed.
While potentially true, we should at least try to acknowledge that the proper outcome may be the more lenient one. I'm not sure that arguing for harsher, less fair outcomes for everybody will actually get us the result we want. Pointing to injustice as an argument in favor of more injustice, rather than less, is pretty fucked up, IMO.
Demanding an eight year sentence for what seems to be a legitimate mistake made in the course of a job we asked her to do, carrying weapons that we gave her to carry, seems excessive to me. Eighteen months, arguably, seems a little light. We can hang her from a gibbet it won't bring Duante Wright back. And I can't imagine that two or three years of incarceration (because again, I agree eighteen months is light) is insufficient deterrent to encourage cops to, you know, learn to use their weapons properly.
I agree the pace of change is frustratingly slow, but I guess I remember a time when this never sees a trial, let alone a conviction and custodial sentence.
Well by that logic every single act of negligence or recklessness that results in a death should result in a life sentence. All of them. Car accident? Somebody dies? Life.
I guess that's a marginally less obscene justice system than the one from that bad Wesley episode of Star Trek. But only marginally.
Truckers who accidentally kill someone while driving routinely get 5-10 years for manslaughter. No malice, malice intent just a mistake or imcompetence. Why are we treating a cop different than another person who accidentally kills someone doing their job.
Absent specific aggravating factors (intoxicated, texting, or specifically reckless actions) I would agree that those sentences are excessive too. Especially since a typical sentence for vehicular manslaughter in most states is like 5 years or less. It still comes down for me to "which is the right answer," not "let's make it fair." If "fair" is actually the wrong answer, and unreasonably retributive. I'm surprised to hear that 10 year sentences are typical for truck drivers who aren't intoxicated, driving beyond their daily limits, overloaded, or otherwise specifically negligent. If true, that is also a thing we should change.
If I thought a possible life sentence for recklessly driving and killing someone would actually make the roads safer, I'd consider it. Since it wouldn't do anything though, because no one driving 55 through a residential 25 is thinking about the possible long term impact of their action otherwise they wouldn't be doing something so stupidly dangerous. Maybe it'd give the driver the actual proper weight of responsibility driving should have.
Nope. I do appreciate you spelling it out, but you're wrong. DP couldn't be bothered to make a point. All he said was that Potter's sentence was lenient compared to certain other wildly excessive sentences, which... yeah, duh. All non-excessive sentences are lenient in comparison to excessive sentences. That's axiomatic. The implication I guessed he was attempting to make (since his apparent discomfort with ever stating a thesis means I have to guess) was that he felt Potter's sentence should be more like those aforementioned wildly excessive sentences. Is that so unreasonable an interpretation? There was nothing about white supremacy in his post, nothing about Potter upholding white supremacy, and nothing about her being rewarded for it. Y'all seem to hold as an article of faith that white supremacy is at play every time anything bad happens between cops and black people. I don't share that paradigm. If he'd said what you did, I would have nodded along. He didn't.
Given his pending aggravated robbery charge, the warrant for his arrest on a separate case also involving a pistol, the accusation against him of shooting a young man in the head, his repeatedly fleeing the police, his willingness to drive high without a license, his willingness to get into a car chase with the police, and the fact that he was stupid enough to make incriminating videos of himself underage drinking and playing with a pistol at the scene of said aggravated robbery charge... I'm going to guess six.
My issue here is that it's a little annoying that the injustices always get "fixed" when it applies to rich, white people or cops, and somehow it doesn't ever seem to extend beyond that. And this happens again and again, and every time we go "they are barely getting a slap on the wrist" people go "but don't you think the justice system should be fixed, that sentences are unfair and too long? This should be a good thing, that we want everyone to see!"
And then it happens again in a few months/year. Repeat.
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The problem is that if the consequence is only fair for the white supremacists, nothing changes.
Equality under Law. If they want fair sentences, everyone should get fair sentences. Otherwise it's just out and out oppression.
Yup. There's a reason to call for changes to the judicial system, across arrests/prosecutions (what a black or brown person will be arrested/prosecuted for is often harsher than a similar crime by a white person), sentencing, and the treatment and reformation of prisoners.
Happy to discuss that. But until things get changed on a grand scale, no, the middle aged, middle class white people shouldn't be the first ones getting it, because they're the only ones getting it. 10% of the maximum sentence, 20% of the average, is ridiculously lenient, given how the law treats other people.
And I'll stand by my position that as a law enforcement officer, and a field training officer at that, she should be held to a higher standard than a regular member of the public. Not a lower one.
Sorry, but this is the same gooseshit argument used to defend Aaron Persky giving a sweetheart deal to an unrepentant rapist, and it's just as gooseshit here.
Not to me. The power to end a life should weigh heavily on someone, and the consequences for fucking up with it should be severe.
I mean, I generally don't believe in retributive justice at all as a concept, personally. All justice should be trying to achieve something constructive, or to the benefit of society, and punishment for its own sake isn't either of those things, in my view.
Absolutely, and with no consequences or very mild consequences for ending lives by mistake constantly, the Police have no incentive to reform the way they serve warrants or other procedures that increase the risk to both the Police, and the public at large, as well as people who are only suspects and not convicted by anyone but the officers fears.
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Daunte Wright is dead. He has been robbed of the freedom to be alive, which is the most fundamental freedom and the freedom AZ was referring to.
But you already knew that. I've read quite a few of your posts over the years, you're a literate person, there's nothing wrong with your reading comprehension. You made a conscious choice to misinterpret AbsoluteZero's question as "how much of Daunte's life was he going to spend outside of prison anyway?" so that you could do a Top 10 Reasons Daunte Wright Was No Angel countdown, and then reach up your arse and around your head to yank out the figure of six months.
I'm not going to get through to you and I'm not trying to. Why would I? You are a racist and you argue in bad faith. I only hope more people will realise this and stop replying to you.