A leaked video from the deadliest police department in the country catches its sheriff clearly stating that his deputies have a financial incentive to kill suspects instead of wounding them.
The post WATCH: Sheriff of Deadliest Dept in US Says His Deputies Have Financial Incentive to “Kill” People appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
A leaked video from the deadliest police department in the country catches its sheriff clearly stating that his deputies have a financial incentive to kill suspects instead of wounding them.
The post WATCH: Sheriff of Deadliest Dept in US Says His Deputies Have Financial Incentive to “Kill” People appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
After a heroic cop did the right thing and chose not to kill a suicidal father, he was fired for preserving life. Now the taxpayers are being held responsible for the murderous wishes of the department.
The post Taxpayers Shell Out $175K for Brave Cop Fired by Dept. for Refusing to Kill a Man appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
The Thin Blue line police Facebook page posted a meme telling parents that cops will shoot and kill their children and the internet is freaking out.
The post Police Facebook Page Tells Parents to Respect the Gun or They will Kill Their Kids appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
In a state that has become infamous for the number of citizens killed by police, the governor is ramming through a bill that will grant all cops immunity.
While 2017 was one of the safest years for police on record, police killings in the United States have become an epidemic with no signs of slowing down.
There are detailed mortality statistics, maintained by the government, on just about every cause of death of Americans, with the exception of one category; death by cop. Perusing through the FBI’s database, there’s even a category called “Law Enforcement Officers Killed In The Line Of Duty.” However, as The Free Thought Project has previously reported, there are still no statistics on the number of citizens killed by police officers.
There exists, however, a citizen-run database which estimates the number of people killed by police has exceeded 1,000 per year since 2014. So far, according to Killed By Police’s findings, 2017 will be no different. This year, if the pace of police killings doesn’t change, at least one thousand people will lose their lives in officer-involved shootings.
During the first quarter of 2017 (and it’s not yet over), based upon media reports alone, police officers around the country have killed 283 people, while only 28 police officers have lost their lives in the line of duty. Of those 28, only a few (8) were killed as a direct result of violence.
The number of those killed by police may be much higher, as the Killed By Police website relies on data mining of news stories to compile its statistics, an unreliable method at best. The fact the government does not maintain such an invaluable database serves as fodder for conspiracy theorists, who may conclude the government is trying to cook the books and hide the real numbers.
In October, FBI Director James Comey addressed the lack of transparency. In San Diego, addressing a gathering of police chiefs from around the nation, Comey said Americans believe there’s an “epidemic” of police brutality because “those are the videos they see over and over again,” referring to the internet and news reports. Obviously, relying on video evidence alone is not enough to substantiate the claims an epidemic of police on citizen violence is occurring.
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In the same speech, the FBI director then admitted the truth. “Americans actually have no idea whether the number of black people, brown people, or white people shot by police is up, down, or sideways over the last three years, five years, or 10 years,” Comey acknowledged, “They have no idea whether Black people, or Brown people, are more likely to be shot during (police) encounters than White people are.” In the end, as TFTP has concluded, no one will ever know unless the government chooses to pass a law requiring all police-involved shootings to be recorded in a national database.
Comey’s comments mirror his concerns from 2015 when he testified before a House oversight committee.
I think it’s embarrassing for those of us in government who care deeply about these issues, especially the use of force by law enforcement, that we can’t have an informed discussion because we don’t have data. People have data about who went to a movie last weekend or how many books were sold or how many cases of the flu walked into an emergency room, and I cannot tell you how many people were shot by police in the United States last month, last year, or anything about the demographics, and that’s a very bad place to be.
Following the meeting with the chiefs of police, the FBI announced it will begin to collect information and data from police involved shootings and use of force by law enforcement officers. But submitting the data is voluntary on the part of police departments, so it’s unclear just how reliable such a database will ultimately be. Such a volitional requirement is disturbing to civil rights groups. According to one source, “The American Civil Liberties Union has objected that voluntary reporting programs on police-community encounters have failed in the past. The ACLU seeks greater accountability and imposition of financial penalties for failure to produce such data.”
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Will 2017 be the year of greater transparency, higher levels of accountability, and the year the government finally takes the matter serious enough to initiate such a database? These questions and more remain unanswered. In the meanwhile, vigilant citizens will continue to do their part to record those killings when they find them. Unfortunately, the citizen-led database will continue to depend on news stories for its data. But many times, people who are shot and killed by police, have their names withheld until family members can be notified of their death. As a result, it can be presumed, many deaths simply do not get reported in our nation’s press.
Comey might be right. There may not be an epidemic of police killings but until modern policing methods and academies change the way they address their “use of force” policies, the number of humans killed by police will likely rise, as the true statistics remain hidden from public view.
Police in England killed a total of 5 people in all of 2016. Cops in America killed 230 times more than them, coming in with a total of 1,152 lives taken. If this doesn’t say, ‘hey we have a problem,’ what does?
Already, only four days into 2017, American cops have killed two times as many people as England has in the entire year of 2016.
But America has a much larger population and therefore these numbers don’t matter, right? Wrong.
China, whose population is 4 and 1/2 times the size of the United States, recorded a single killing by law enforcement officers in 2016.
More people were killed by American police in just the last four days than were killed in 2016 in Germany, England, Spain, Switzerland, and Iceland — combined.
Police killings have gotten so bad that in September, a United Nations expert working group released a scathing report that was debated at the U.N. Human Rights Council. The report noted that police killings of black people in the United States are reminiscent of lynchings and the government must step up to protect them.
In the United States, the overall homicide rate is 5 per 100,000 among the citizens. The rate at which police kill is 30 times that amount.
As the Free Thought Project has pointed out time and again, the lack of punishment police receive for brutality and killing seemingly encourages this violent and irresponsible behavior.
Police killings go unpunished because initial investigations are usually conducted by the police department where the alleged perpetrator works, because prosecutors have wide discretion over presenting charges, and because the use of force is not subject to international standards, the experts’ group said, according to Reuters.
Aside from the lack of punishment, the job description of a cop has changed drastically following the onset of the drug war.
The overwhelming majority of police brutality cases stem from the war on drugs. When so many people are tasked with finding and prosecuting those in possession of a substance deemed illegal, the interactions become more frequent and less cordial. If we end that, we get the state out of the private lives of most individuals. This will only serve to lessen the scope of police harassment, in turn lessening the instance of brutality and killings.
We can look at the prohibition of alcohol and the subsequent mafia crime wave that ensued as a result.
Criminal gangs form to protect sales territory and supply lines. They then monopolize the control of the constant demand. Their entire operation is dependent upon police arresting people for drugs. However, the illegality of drug possession and use is what keeps the low-level users and dealers in and out of the court systems.
This revolving door of creating and processing criminals fosters the phenomenon known as Recidivism. Recidivism is a fundamental concept of criminal justice that shows the tendency of those who are processed into the system and the likelihood of future criminal behavior.
The War on Drugs creates criminals every single minute of every single day. The system is setup in such a way that it fans the flames of violent crime by essentially building a factory that turns out violent criminals.
The system knows this too.
When drugs are legalized, gang violence drops — drastically. Not only does it have a huge effect on the localized gangs in America, but the legalization of drugs is crippling to the violent foreign drug cartels too.
Until Americans educate themselves on the cause of this violence, uninformed and corrupt lawmakers will continue to focus on controlling the symptoms.
We will see more senseless killings and more innocent lives stripped of opportunity by getting entangled in the system. It is high time we #End the Drug War
The time for peaceful action is now.
Directly contradicting a widely-publicized Harvard study, an investigation by Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health Professor James W. Buehler found black Americans are three times more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts.
Although Buehler’s study disputes the controversial Harvard findings, the exponentially higher death rate for minorities at the hands of police aligns with a number of other studies of the subject.
Philly.com reports:
“Using data from 2010 to 2014, Buehler calculated that African Americans had died at a rate of 6.8 per million residents, markedly higher than the white rate of 2.5. The Hispanic rate, 4.1, was between the figures for blacks and whites.”
Buehler’s analysis, published in the January edition of the American Journal of Public Health, found that, between 2010 and 2014, police killed around 450 people each year, mostly males — although independent organizations tracking such deaths found numbers significantly higher.
Telling of the issue of police violence in itself, the fact the number of people cops kill isn’t known stands at the heart of the issue — particularly as public debate rages over whether or not blacks are victims more often than whites.
“I wanted to put out this reminder that there are important disparities,” the professor, who served as Philadelphia’s health commissioner from 2014 to 2016, told Philly.com.
While Buehler found the higher rate of death by police for African Americans, the widely-circulated Harvard study by economist Roland G. Fryer, Jr., received the bulk of attention from politicians and law enforcement advocates — largely because no discrepancy in the rate of death was found.
But Fryer only analyzed the albeit markedly thorough data provided by a single city — Houston, Texas. As Philly.com explains:
“A frequent collaborator on projects examining race with Freakonomics author Steven Levitt, Fryer determined that though officers were more prone to use nonlethal force against black citizens, there was no evidence of racial bias in deadly encounters that had been precipitated by specific events. Indeed, Fryer wrote that in Houston, African Americans were nearly 24 percent less likely to be shot at by police than whites were.”
However, despite access to unusually detailed information, Fryer examined only specific types of encounters between police and the public — those in which cops resorted to lethal force after being summoned to the scene of an aggravated assault, for example — and did not include incidents resulting from routine traffic stops and the like.
Considering the number of highly controversial deaths by police in such incidents occurring in otherwise routine situations — for example, the fatal shooting of Philando Castile near St. Paul, Minnesota, where the aftermath was captured on live video by his girlfriend — the omission is a glaring one that likely decidedly skewed Fryer’s findings.
Studying a single city, Buehler noted of the Harvard report would also not present an accurate picture of a national problem — though access to equivalent information elsewhere is nearly impossible to obtain.
Buehler emphasized to Philly.com that, despite the sizable differences in their findings, he saw no conflict between his and Fryer’s analyses.
“I don’t think [Fryer] got anything wrong,” the professor explained, “I thought what he did was ask a very specific question, and the answer was misinterpreted and misunderstood.”
Further, the war on drugs and inexplicable continuance earlier this year of the Drug Enforcement Agency-led prohibition on cannabis — recently unjustifiably expanded to include non-psychoactive but medicinal CBD oil — leads to an untold and as-yet not thoroughly examined number of deaths by police each year.
Seeing this disparity should come as no surprise as the war on drugs was created to target black people. In fact, when looking at who suffers most from the drug war, it is the black community as they also receive far harsher penalties for the same ‘crimes’ as their white counterparts.
In a March report, in Harper’s Magazine, written by Dan Baum, John Daniel Ehrlichman, counsel and domestic policy chief to President Richard Nixon, came clean on the real reason behind the war on drugs — to criminalize blacks and hippies.
According to Baum, he tracked down Ehrlichman in 1994 at his engineering firm in Atlanta, Georgia.
“You want to know what this was really all about?” Ehrlichman bluntly asked Baum of the war on drugs. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
As former Congressman Ron Paul pointed out prior to the revelation admitted by Ehrlichman and the recent Colorado report;
[Black peope] are tried and imprisoned disproportionately. They suffer the consequence of the death penalty disproportionately. Rich white people don’t get the death penalty very often. And most of these are victimless crimes. Sometimes people can use drugs and get arrested three times and never committed a violent act and they can go to prison for life. I think there’s discrimination in the system, but you have to address the drug war. I would say the judicial system is probably one of the worst places where prejudice and discrimination still exists in this country.
Indisputably, the atmosphere in the United States has tensed considerably as large swaths of the population fear police and attempt to avoid interactions at all costs, as the moment an officer decides to employ deadly force seems not to have rhyme or reason.
Chuck Wexler, of the Police Executive Research Forum, currently works with police to reform use-of-force policies and develop better techniques of de-escalation to avoid having to employ force whenever possible. Wexler told NPR,
“How many cases [resulting in violence or death] would have been prevented when someone is obviously getting upset and losing their cool, if another officer had said, ‘Hey, step back, let me take over?’ That’s what you need — cool heads to prevail in.”
For black Americans, hearing Buehler’s findings they are three times as likely to be killed by police than whites might seem a tragic confirmation of what has been denied by law enforcement and police advocates — but for there to be a rate of killings by police at all is more telling of the magnitude of an apparently complex problem.
Unofficial tallies of the dead paint a bloody picture of American policing in 2016, as the Washington Post’s Fatal Force puts the total killed, as of publication of this article, at 940, and the Guardian’s The Counted lists 1,045 — but the true number of fatalities caused by police is likely far higher.
