Quote:
Originally Posted by PilotMan
What percentage of these defendants do you suppose were black? I don't know, but I can tell you this type of police practice has been going on for well over 20 years now.
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I was thinking about this today too. I think it's probably good in the long run, that that all this officer stuff is being examined, but things are a LOT better than they were 20 years ago. And hell, it was only 1985 when the the United Supreme Court first held that it was a 4th Amendment violation for an officer to use intentionally lethal force on a fleeing felon suspect. Lots of the officers who lived under those prior rules are still around. You could shoot a fleeing suspect in the back in the head and get a medal for it - in the 80s!. (Even that scene from Fargo where the officer shoots the feeling bad guy plays so much differently today than it did in 1994....And remember Frank Drebbin getting an award for killing his 1,000th drug dealer? Sure, that was satire, but I don't think it'd be as funny today - today we'd sympathize much more with the drug dealer than the officer.) Officers haven't gotten worse, the rest of of society has just changed their expectations, and law enforcement agencies have to keep up with those changing expectations.
I think a lot of attitudes have changed with the drastic reduction of crime in this country, and that's a good thing. I think it's easy to forget, even 20 years ago, there was a ton more acceptance in the masses for cops "busting heads" and aggressively going after criminals. Especially in New York. People loved to see officers going after street criminals in a city where they didn't feel safe. Giuliani, the architect of this approach, became one of the most popular New Yorkers of all time. Now that they do feel safe - those aggressive tactics feel completely different. I've heard a million old-timey police stories from back of the day and a lot of them are pretty horrifying. New cops coming up today know that their every move and word is recorded, so it takes a different type of person to succeed. And this is kind of a mixed bag - because I think generally, cops today are more military-like and professional, and less folksy and problem-solvy. There's definitely good things about that, more and more, courts require officers to know not just the law but how the appellate courts have interpreted it. So officers have to be smarter book-wise, but they're probably also a little colder and less in tune with the people in their communities. They have to say all the right things and know how to do that - but then that can come off as fake and rehearsed and people don't trust it. (Every DUI trial testimony sounds exactly the same, because there's a formula that ensures full compliance with the constitution and makes convictions appeal-proof - but when cops look and sound like robots and say the same thing every time - it seems like it'd be easy just to say that same thing no matter what actually happened, it feels less human and sincere).