Did I...did I really just get internal affairs departments thrown in my face as a demonstration that police don't cover up abuse?


lololololololoolololololololooloololololololololol ooollllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

This was a smart rebuttal, and the response proves it.

Hahahahahaha (not at you).

Also:

Violent Crime rate:

To be fair, they've had a slight drop in violent crime rate, however, slight increase in homicide rate since this was done. It's still an extremely unsafe city.

It's obviously true that it's still a very unsafe city but I don't know where you're getting your data from because violent crime rates and homicides specifically have both dropped significantly since the reform happened in 2013. In 2012 there were 1,993 recorded violent crimes and in 2018 (the most recent year with complete FBI crime data) there were 1,198. There has been a fairly consistent downward trend in violent crime rates since 2013.

Similarly there were 67 homicides in 2012 and just 23 in 2018. 2012 was a bit of an outlier and the normal range was more like 35-50 but each of the last three years Camden has had fewer than 25 homicides, so it definitely seems to have improved quite significantly.

It's certainly not a panacea but the shift in approach has definitely improved police/community relations and seems to have also been somewhat effective at reducing crime.

Edit: Numbers are mostly from FBI data here. For some reason the Camden numbers have switched between the City and County tables a couple of times but everything I got was from either table 8 (city) or table 10 (county) in the violent crime section of the reports.

Previous post about Camden. See also this post.

they got rid of the union and poof it got better? what a novel idea

Don’t know where this needs to go. But it seems Brooks was desperate to not get arrested because he was on probation.

That’s an indictment on the probation system and on the society for failures to reintegrate people trying to become productive members of society.

I'm not gonna argue the numbers, other than to say that I'm not sure how much we can attribute that to them changing things, but if we did, it's awfully ironic has to do with busting the union, and hiring more cops. which is kind of the opposite of what's being argued, i.e. defund.

I think the relationship definitely has to improve and doing what they did as far as putting people on the beat was smart. Also, the single biggest thing that can be done to lower crime and improve the relationship need to get out of the drug game.

How do you know all of this? All I know is that he passed out in the Wendy's drive thru last Friday night. I don't know anything about how well adjusted he was otherwise. It seems all his prior convictions were domestic in nature and a few years ago (although this could be incorrect, it isn't something the media has been super forthcoming about for obvious reasons)

Also, his BAC was barely above the legal limit; so it seems strange he would have passed out in the drive thru, ran over a curb while trying to park his car after being woken up, and then failed a field sobriety test. It seems likely there was something else in his system than alcohol, but I guess eventually there will be autopsy results and we will find out.

During the same time period there was an overall drop in violent crime. WN crunched some numbers in a different post (thread?) and crime in Camden did drop more than neighboring Philadelphia, so it seems there is something there, but could just be variance too.

I guess we will find out soon enough whether policing reforms have the intended effects. I will say most of the big blue cities are starting out in a pretty big hole as far as things gettin better, as the last couple weeks while the police have been under intense scrutiny have been excessively criminal and violent (record breaking in places).

I think the database could be very important. Probably not this year but the mere existence of the database is going to provide the framework for reform minded people (at any level) to finally bring some transparency into the problem of police brutality.

I call BS on you never seeing people pass out on 0.1 alcohol.

Taking a billion steps back, even if you needed "something else" to pass out on 0.1, that something else could easily be grief (from visiting mother's grave) or fatigue (from trying to make ends meet.)

WTF? How does "it seems strange" turn into "I never have seen anyone pass out?" I mean, if you completely change what I said, then yeah, it is easy to call me out on the imaginary thing I never said.

But yeah, it is certainly in the realm of possibility he passed out with a BAC of 0.1. But it is still strange. Also, you turning this into some kind of shaming performance is weird, but you do you I guess.

Let me just rephrase then.

I call BS you find it strange someone with 0.1 alcohol can pass out/fall asleep at the wheel and you really think Brooks "probably" had something else in him because he fell asleep with 0.1 and not because of your prejudices.

If you're the average person, you won't know whether or not police reforms are working. Unlike many of us, the average person won't look into the stats and make comparisons between policing now vs policing 4 years into the future. Because the average person will remember that they haven't binge-watched the latest Black Mirror season yet, and The Tiger King is starring in it (wow that show has really jumped the shark).

Sometime within the next 4 years, a cop will kill an unarmed black person. This will be put on mainstream media and the narrative will be "Cops are still racist, the system is still systemically racist, black people are getting mowed down by white supremacist police." And the general public will buy into it because that's what NBC News or CNN tells them. It doesn't matter that the chances of being killed by a policeman in the U.S. while unarmed is the same as being killed by lightning (49 killings of unarmed U.S. citizens in 2019, 49 lightning-related fatalities in the U.S. per year according to NOAA). The facts don't matter.

We can't eradicate cops killing people for the same reason we can't eradicate murder or rape. We live in the real world, and a lot of people are scum. Some of those scum are going to rise through the police ranks and have readily-available gun access.

I hope that a police reform bill gets signed to address some of the common-sense (imo) problems, such as eliminating qualified immunity & no-knock warrants, mandatory bodycam video access, etc. But even if you can come up with the perfect set of guidelines, there will still be that one time where a cop kills a person, whether justly or unjustly, and social/mainstream media and the hysterical mob will reopen the narrative of 'abolish the police, white people are guilty', and the whole sad affair will repeat.

To be fair to Jimmy, I suppose it's true that the median person in the United States is white.

I have no idea where you're going with this. To me, the median person in the U.S. (regardless of race) that checks the news reads/listens to mainstream media and forms opinions based on what they see/hear. So when they're bombarded with the narrative of 'The police are racist, they slaughter innocent black people, defund the police, abolish the police' that's what the public will believe. The actual stats on police violence are immaterial.

Again, the reforms I talked about would be great additions to weed out terrible police officers, and we should tack on many more hours of training. It shouldn't take longer to train to be a cosmetologist than to be a cop. But you'll never get the number of murders by cops to zero.

I think the median black person would probably have different feelings about whether or not they'd notice changes in policing behavior over time. The reason black parents have conversations with their children (that parents of white children never even need to think about) about how to interact with police is not simply because of a dozen incidents per year ending in someone's death that they only vaguely heard about from television; it's because of experiences and interactions they and their families have lived through.

btw, you have any plans to return to the statue thread? That take you dropped there was lit.

Those conversations fail to reach a lot of black youth, because they are seen - time and again - belligerently posturing during encounters with police. It is a very integral factor in the escalation and resultant negative outcomes we wish to eliminate. It's behavior that is honestly self-fulfilling.

So the knee-jerk idea is to neuter or remove authority from the equation, and replace it with some vague substitute.

It will not work. And lol the notion that it's an original idea, yet to be implemented and tested. We don't need the experiment, because there is no unknown.

this is the biggest issue I have

if you are so scared of the police then why don't you act like it lol

I can't remember ever having the bright idea of trying to fight the police in any situation

If you think they will kill you given the chance then why act aggressive for no reason giving them the chance?

This isn't true. My parents told me to respect the police no matter what the circumstance, and all my friends went through the same thing. Like maybe I wasn't speeding through town when I got pulled over. I keep my hands at 10 & 2 and answer "Yes Sir, No Sir", or I spend an evening at the County Inn.

And you're generalizing that every black family lives through negative interactions with police. I don't care what 'Cops' or BLM says, that's not the case. Excessive force complaints are miniscule; to generalize there are around 55 million encounters between cops and people, and there are about 30,000 complaints. Do the math.

I could bring up that Pelosi wants to take down portraits in the Capitol to erase more history and get into it, but this isn't the right thread.

I've only started to get into these political topics to bring up what I think/know and to hear what other people have to say. I watch videos and read books from everyone from Michael Eric Dyson and Ta Nehisi Coates to Coleman Hughes, Larry Elder, and Ben Shapiro. Attacking people that you don't agree with isn't helping anything.

What I meant by the last sentence was going into different threads to attack people about entirely different topics seems counterproductive and it jumbles things up.

I was the victim of a home invasion recently. I ran away and let them take all of my valuables. I called the police and a social worker showed up to tell me that they had to do it because of historic injustice

Brooks was just sleeping peacefully, he wasn't a threat to anyone! He just fired that taser to give himself a jet boost to quickly get home to his daughters birthday party!