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  • in reply to: 3rd Degree Murder was the proper charge #115893
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    Two of the charged cops, apparently, were very new, and essentially being trained.

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    in reply to: Progressive beats CIA candidate in New Mexico #115887
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    Funky Academic on white-progressive-left. From 2017.

    in reply to: attacking the press #115886
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    in reply to: attacking the press #115885
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    Has anyone from FOX been attacked? Just curious.

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    in reply to: Sports and the Protests #115871
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    in reply to: Progressive beats CIA candidate in New Mexico #115862
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    Teresa Leger Fernandez

    During the campaign, Leger Fernandez was endorsed by Congresswoman Deb Haaland, EMILY’s List, and The Santa Fe New Mexican. A political progressive, Leger was endorsed by the Working Families Party, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Leger has advocated for a “New Mexico Green New Deal” and Medicare For All.

    Though she did take some dark money.

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    I was guilty of having an iota of hope, again.

    Thank-you for dashing my hope 🙂

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    in reply to: History of Policing, and stuff #115849
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    If you havent watched this Alex Vitale interview, you are missing one of the best overall interviews I’ve seen in the last ten years.

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    “At root, they fail to appreciate that the basic nature of the law and the police, since its earliest origins, is to be a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status quo. Police reforms that fail to directly address this reality are doomed to reproduce it.”
    ― Alex Vitale, The End of Policing

    in reply to: Sports and the Protests #115847
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    Matt Waldman@MattWaldman
    There’s a difference between between hateful and ignorant. People—especially liberals—are too apt to shame when they see ignorance and lump it with hate. Some want to punish immediately, ask questions later. Brees wasn’t hateful but what he said is hurtful because he’s

    Ignorant of the underlying ties between his desire to be patriotic (good), what is patriotic (what he appears not to see), and what is the priority that most military I have known or spoken with would tell you (human rights and right to protest).

    I am a huge fan of Drew Brees’s game. So are the players who work with him on the field. Brees is a perfect example of an intelligent, hardworking, often compassionate person can be insidiously brainwashed for so long that they don’t or refuse to see what’s obvious to many.

    It’s the heartbreaking thing about our nation’s disease. Those who perpetrated this disease politically tie it to false notions of safety and patriotism.

    American slavery was the most brutal form of slavery in world history. When over, there was no recompense, training, or enforcement of the new laws. Jim Crow laws were awful–Nazis studied them to prepare for their regime of government. They rejected many of them as too harsh!

    Jim Crow laws benefited whites and hurt blacks in quality of real estate, education, law enforcement–institutions that set you and your family up for life and the lives of your children and children’s children or can derail and hurt those dependent on you early in life.

    Why wasn’t the Tusla massacre taught in most U.S. schools? A thriving black area of town with black-owned businesses bombed from the air, and black families massacred and buried in unmarked graves–set off by a woman behaving like Amy Cooper.

    Why are textbooks in many states equating the indentured servitude of the Irish with the slavery of Africans in America? And if you can’t get with “why” you can still acknowledge how these elements brainwash us into denial that anything needs to be fixed.

    The point is that we’ve been brainwashed in this country by people who didn’t want to own up to what they did to blacks and how it earned them power and money. We may not be directly complicit with those acts but it set the foundation for inherent advantages/disadvantages.

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    Good Lord. Matt Waldman knows about the Tulsa thing? Wow.
    Very impressed.

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    in reply to: Sports and the Protests #115846
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    =========================
    FWIW. At Yahoo:https://sports.yahoo.com/drew-brees-apologizes-for-comments-about-kneeling-protests-i-stand-with-the-black-community-124049826.html
    Drew Brees apologized on Thursday morning for his recent comments about players kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial injustice.

    Brees, the longtime New Orleans Saints quarterback, posted his apology on Instagram, and indicated that he’d spoken to several people about how his comments made them feel and the pain his words had caused them.

    in reply to: So what can the protestors accomplish? #115829
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    The thing, WV, is that in a nuanced argument, you’re right, but that language is also used by Republicans in an outright racist manner and Democrats in a dog whistle racist manner.

    There’s a whole thing about “ignorant blacks” not being smart enough to understand politics, the infantilization of the African Americans, especially black men, while at the same time holding them as being violent and inherently criminal.

    So, even if just from a language perspective, and I hear and share your frustration about the unfortunate efficacy of propaganda, I really can’t go with you with respect to “dumbing down older African Americans”.

    Totally agree 100% about the corporatocracy/idiocracy argument. And yes, with a combination (that isn’t based on race) of a lack of curiosity as well as terribly efficacious propaganda, we have people who think they are acting in their own best self interest.

    I just have to be mindful about the history of that argument and the issues it has with respect to race.

    And, no, absolutely not, do I think that you’re wrong on the pure math of it.

    But it reminds me of that Chris Rock bit, “I hate N****rs”. He stopped doing it not because he stopped believing that there weren’t some trifling idiots who fuck everything up for those who just wanna live, but because it was partly being hijacked to justify racism.

    I don’t wanna leave that possibility with this argument.

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    Oh, believe me, i get what yer saying. Thats why I dont go too many sentences without writing about White people being dummed-down. And then I always make sure to emphasize the argument is about propaganda and its effectiveness, not about race, or IQ etc etc.

    But yeah, i know. I only get on this subject when I talking to people i trust.
    Most of the time, i just bland-i-fy it down to “Capitalist propaganda leads to people voting against their own interest.” Which is just another way of saying it.

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    in reply to: History of Policing, and stuff #115828
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    This whole interview is very good. But at about the 14 min mark he argues that more black police officers does not change things. He explains why.

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    in reply to: Police Misconduct and Civilian Review Boards #115804
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    PS — Reason Magazine has an ‘agenda’ W.

    Its a Libertarian Magazine. I dont imagine they like ‘any’ Union.

    “…Reason was founded in 1968 by Lanny Friedlander (1947–2011),[2][5] a student at Boston University,[6] as a more-or-less monthly mimeographed publication. In 1970 it was purchased by Robert W. Poole Jr., Manuel S. Klausner, and Tibor R. Machan, who set it on a more regular publishing schedule.[5][6] As the monthly print magazine of “free minds and free markets”, it covers politics, culture, and ideas with a mix of news, analysis, commentary, and reviews.

    During the 1970s and 80s, the magazine’s contributors included Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Thomas Szasz, and Thomas Sowell.[7] In 1978, Poole, Klausner, and Machan created the associated Reason Foundation, in order to expand the magazine’s ideas into policy research.[5] Marty Zupan joined Reason in 1975, and served through the 1980s as managing editor and editor-in-chief, leaving in 1989.[8]…”

    Wiki

    in reply to: Police Misconduct and Civilian Review Boards #115803
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    Well, I just dont have a problem with those rules below. If someone murders a black person, none of those procedures below are gonna save the cop. Exactly what would you strip from the rules below?

    Now, again, I WOULD change the power of the ‘civilian review board’ or whatever we wanna call it. There needs to be an independent review of ‘gray area’ stuff. We cant trust the Police to police themselves.

    How to go about that? I dunno enough about it to say anything. I’m just saying what we need.

    I dont mind tinkering around with some of those rules, and if thats what you mean by lessening the power of the Unions I might be ok with it, but it just depends on which powers you wanna weaken.

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    “…That’s where the special treatment begins, but it doesn’t end there.

    Unlike a member of the public, the officer gets a “cooling off” period before he has to respond to any questions. Unlike a member of the public, the officer under investigation is privy to the names of his complainants and their testimony against him before he is ever interrogated. Unlike a member of the public, the officer under investigation is to be interrogated “at a reasonable hour,” with a union member present. Unlike a member of the public, the officer can only be questioned by one person during his interrogation. Unlike a member of the public, the officer can be interrogated only “for reasonable periods,” which “shall be timed to allow for such personal necessities and rest periods as are reasonably necessary.” Unlike a member of the public, the officer under investigation cannot be “threatened with disciplinary action” at any point during his interrogation. If he is threatened with punishment, whatever he says following the threat cannot be used against him.

    What happens after the interrogation again varies from state to state. But under nearly every law enforcement bill of rights, the following additional privileges are granted to officers: Their departments cannot publicly acknowledge that the officer is under investigation; if the officer is cleared of wrongdoing or the charges are dropped, the department may not publicly acknowledge that the investigation ever took place, or reveal the nature of the complaint. The officer cannot be questioned or investigated by “non-government agents,” which means no civilian review boards. If the officer is suspended as a result of the investigation, he must continue to receive full pay and benefits until his case is resolved. In most states, the charging department must subsidize the accused officer’s legal defense…”

    in reply to: So what can the protestors accomplish? #115787
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    Ball and Saagar interviewed a black man after South Carolina, or Super Tuesday, some guy from the South. I don’t remember if he was a professor, or what his credentials were, but he said blacks in the South voted for Biden because they simply weren’t going to trust a white man’s promises (Sanders) since they are beyond allowing themselves to hope that one day a white man will actually keep his promise to do something. They know Biden isn’t going to change anything, but at least he isn’t promising to change anything, so they know what they will get with him.

    He actually made a pretty interesting case for that.

    I just searched for the video, but couldn’t find it. It would probably help if I remembered his name.

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    Yeah, I have watched a lot of Funky-Academic’s vids over the last month, but I dont really buy what he’s selling on this topic. I can only speculate wildly, but immho, he is doing all kinds of mental-contortion to avoid the conclusion that many many blacks were dummed-down and consequently voted against their own interest. Just like with Whites.

    I just dont buy the notion that blacks voted for Biden because they knew Biden was not going to do shit. And they liked that.

    They voted for Biden (imho) because Biden is connected to Obama. And they voted for Obama because he is black, and because they were dummed down enough to think that Mr Black-Corporate-Goldman-Sachs was on their side.

    In an idiocracy its not only Whites who have been idiot-ized. Blacks are not immune to Corporate Propaganda. And the funky academic just cant come out and say it.

    I think guys like Adolph Reed Jr. might very well come out and say it if he were asked.

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    in reply to: Police & protestors — conflicting images #115778
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    De Blasio is a political-dick but if you watch all this, he does say some good things here:

    in reply to: One reason leftists don’t think much of liberals #115774
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    <
    I think any civilian review board can only have the power to review facts and come to conclusions. I don’t believe they have the power to fire cops. The courts pursuant a consent decree can oversee certain changes that it deems needs to be made. But that would always be pursuant to a settlement. But they cannot make personnel decisions. If an officer is involved with criminal conduct then the only remedy is prosecution by the D.A. or the Feds if the conduct involves a Civil rights violation.

    Bottom line is we got a lot of bad cops still on the beat and the main reason rests with their unions. Sorry about that.

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    Well, maybe some Union Lawyers do need to be sent to Re-Education camps 🙂

    in reply to: So what can the protestors accomplish? #115773
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    in reply to: One reason leftists don’t think much of liberals #115754
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    I believe there is a way to have strong Unions and still fire/charge people who Brutalize others.

    my guess is if you got rid of unions. management wouldn’t offer counseling to cops. they wouldn’t give them things like health insurance or retirement plans. they’d just burn them out and then recruit more cops. i fear that the brutality might actually get worse.

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    Well we already know what life looks like when Police Unions are prohibited.

    The Police Strike

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    in reply to: One reason leftists don’t think much of liberals #115755
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    I believe there is a way to have strong Unions and still fire/charge people who Brutalize others.

    my guess is if you got rid of unions. management wouldn’t offer counseling to cops. they wouldn’t give them things like health insurance or retirement plans. they’d just burn them out and then recruit more cops. i fear that the brutality might actually get worse.

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    I replied but the post got oblivion-ized. Just go to the search box and search “police strike”. The Boston Police strike. See what life is like without a police union.

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    in reply to: Sports and the Protests #115735
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    Actually a link to Coach Lynn talking is in the NFL/protests thread on the other forum. WV I think this vid belongs there: http://theramshuddle.com/topic/rams-on-floyd-protests/#post-115720

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    Ok. Go ahead and move it.

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    in reply to: One reason leftists don’t think much of liberals #115739
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    and that’s not to say that there aren’t racist cops out there. shoot. this country is racist.

    the lady who called the cops on the bird watcher. the men who chased down ahmaud arbery and shot him dead for jogging.

    that’s the sad reality. racism is a societal issue – not just a law enforcement issue.

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    Civilian Review Boards. Made up of Community Members.

    The Police are PUBLIC servants. They should be accountable to US.

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    I know you think unions are critical. Its in your gestalt. I’m pretty sure most followers of Karl Marx and his view of socialism are in the same camp. I know the contributions and protections that unions “in general” provide. But I’m not sure you recognize the dark side as well. You ask for civilian review board to address police misconduct. Can you actually foresee police unions agreeing to that? Can you imagine the police unions NOT fighting any legislative movement to provide for a civilian review board for misconduct? In the Floyd case the police union had to backtrack on early statements made in support of the accused officer. My wife was a school superintendent who fought the school employees union over the firing of the entire maintenance staff involved in pornography and the selling of guns and ammunition ON the school premises. They never gave up protecting the perverts and those illegally selling weapons within the district office on weekends. One “union member” lived in a trailer connected with the district’s electricity and for years -before Barb took over-had been using the district’s electricity. The union did everything in their power to try and get Barb fired and if it wasn’t for a strong Board of Ed. they might have succeeded. But when she worked late at night and on the weekends she was under the protection of police security. In the end the entire maintenance dept of a very large school district was terminated. Her professional and personal life was threatened and if it wasn’t for the courts restraining orders that were strictly enforced she may not have kept her job.

    Now you may have a general belief that since unions are there to protect workers from management but you may not know of the dark side. My wife who -after working in the aerospace industry-began teaching and worked up into various administrative positions and ultimately became a school superintendent. She HAS experienced what a vengeful union can do all in the name of protecting its members. She is also aware of the many totally incompetent teachers that cannot be removed from their position because of rights , including tenure, negotiated by teacher unions during bargaining negotiations. Keep in mind she WAS a teacher-albeit not a member of CTLA-and was nominated by the State of California as one of three best teachers in the State.

    So, its fine to take the general stand of I’m all for unions no matter what because I believe in the little guy who will always be trampled by employers if it isn’t for the unions. That’s fine but you should have an open mind. In that light the main reason you have bad cops that continue working is protection form their union. If you have a way to change that -well-as the Brits say “carry on”.

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    Believe me, i know the dark side of any Human-Organization. Unions included.

    But there’s an even darker side to NOT having strong Unions. We are seeing that thanks to Reagan and the NeoLib-Dems.

    Like i said, i do not buy the argument that Unions can always block firing or charging Bad Cops. I just dont buy it.

    And civilian review boards can be legislated, I assume. Politicians can pass laws requiring it. The Unions wont like it, but if its the law, its the law.

    I believe there is a way to have strong Unions and still fire/charge people who Brutalize others.

    I’m not saying any of this is easy. I got no ‘easy’ solutions.

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    in reply to: Sports and the Protests #115738
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    I put it down there.

    in reply to: One reason leftists don’t think much of liberals #115727
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    and that’s not to say that there aren’t racist cops out there. shoot. this country is racist.

    the lady who called the cops on the bird watcher. the men who chased down ahmaud arbery and shot him dead for jogging.

    that’s the sad reality. racism is a societal issue – not just a law enforcement issue.

    ==================

    Civilian Review Boards. Made up of Community Members.

    The Police are PUBLIC servants. They should be accountable to US.

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    in reply to: One reason leftists don’t think much of liberals #115726
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    Biden did say he opposed ‘cash bail’ which is nice.
    The shooting to maim comment was stupid and is an example of his tone-deafness.

    He needs to come out with an eight or ten point plan for CHANGING police forces. Not a rambling, half-assed cliche-fest.

    Its an historical time. What will he actually DO to prevent police brutality?

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    I’ll tell you how you change “police forces”. Get the bad cops out ! But that ain’t so easy. The core culprits are the police unions-and their attorneys- who will not budge an inch on police brutality claims and will always claim bad conduct was justified. Much like teacher’s unions protecting bad teachers that make it all impossible to fire a teacher that has tenure. And all 1st responders have unions that are paid to prevent any type of disciplinary action against one of their members. And its costly for taxpayers and burdensome on governing authorities to overcome that in court. Been there done that. But THAT is where the reforming must begin. Right square in the face of the unions at the bargaining table when the cops-bad and good-come clamoring for more and more money, benefits and ever increasing measures to protect the bad cops. The Floyd case was an anomaly. The officer’s conduct was recorded for the public to see. He HAD to be charged and the union could not in good faith run interference. But it took until the video surfaced before any resemblance of justice could begin. But most police brutality cases-and you know this as well as I do-are not out in the public to see. Reform is badly needed but the real secret is that it must start with the bargaining agreements formed in negotiations over police salaries, benefits, and independent investigations into claims of conduct by individual officers. That is where it starts. And guess where I got that from WV? Biden himself !

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    I disagree. I think Unions are vital. Critical.

    There’s gotta be a way to have strong Unions and still fire Brutal Cops.
    I simply do not buy the argument that we cant have both Unions and Decent-Cops.

    But i absolutely GUARANTEE you the rightwingers and the corporate-dems WILL use this crisis to try and weaken the police Unions.

    Good lord.

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    in reply to: 3rd Degree Murder was the proper charge #115725
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    “….prosecutors added another, lesser charge — manslaughter in the second degree. That requires not depravity but just negligence under Minnesota law, that Chauvin created “an unreasonable risk, and consciously [took]chances of causing death or great bodily harm,” as the complaint against him reads.

    The defense will present that very same evidence — Chauvin’s impassivity — as an indication not of depravity but simple inattention. His lawyers will be able to point to important additional facts besides the video. According to the store clerk who called 911, Floyd was “awfully drunk” and “not in control of himself.” Floyd resisted getting into the police car, saying he was claustrophobic, and he complained about not being able to breathe before he was handcuffed on the ground. Finally, the lawyers will mount an argument over the exact cause of death….”
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    Well, third degree is indeed a slam dunk, but if i had been prosecuting it, i would have charged second degree, and then also give the jury the chance to convict on the slam-dunk third-degree charge.

    Actually, its a no-brainer to me. But I think if you got ten lawyers in a room, you’d get five saying go with Third Degree and five would say go for Second Degree.

    Btw, I think the fact he was complaining he couldnt breathe BEFORE the cop put his knee on his neck, works FOR the prosecution. If thats not negligence, i dont know what is. The cop was already on notice that the guy was having breathing problems.

    Plus, of course if you charge 2nd degree you might get a Plea to Third Degree, etc.

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    in reply to: Tulsa Riot, May 31st, 1921 #115723
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    in reply to: So what can the protestors accomplish? #115710
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    Battle between Mayor and Police Union

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    Minny Police Union Goes Rogue:https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/05/29/in-minneapolis-a-police-union-gone-rogue/

    Lives are on the line and nothing is going to change until cops are held in check.
    by Nancy LeTourneau
    May 29, 2020

    “….To get some idea of the battle that goes on between the mayor and the police union, here is a story that was reported about a year ago.

    In open defiance of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, the union that represents the city’s roughly 900 rank-and-file police officers announced that it is partnering with a national police organization to offer free “warrior-style” training for any officer who wants it…

    The announcement comes in response to Frey’s ban of the popular training style, which he first revealed in his State of the City address last week. Frey said at the time that Minneapolis would become the first department in the country to eliminate “fear-based” training…

    Many policing agencies, including Minneapolis’, are moving toward “guardian”-oriented tactics, which focus on de-escalating tense situations and use of deadly force as a last resort. But opponents of this approach argue that such techniques endanger officers’ lives by teaching them to let their guard down.

    So the mayor banned the use of this “warrior-style” training, with concurrence from the city’s police chief. But the union defied the ban and subsidized the training for officers anyway. It is also the police union that has defended Officer Derek Chauvin, the one who kept his knee on George Floyd’s neck for over seven minutes, when he was the target of 18 prior complaints.

    I am sympathetic to those who claim that officers like Chauvin are the “bad apples” in departments where honorable men and women serve. I’ve personally known police officers who earned the title of being peace officers. But as they say, “the fish rots from the head,” and it is clear that the police union in Minneapolis went rogue a long time ago.

    It is also worth noting that there is a political angle to all of this. Not only did Trump tweet that Mayor Frey is “very weak,” he went on to blast out the threat of “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” I suspect that the president remembers what happened when he came to Minneapolis last fall.

    Lt. Bob Kroll, the head of the Minneapolis police union, took the stage prior to President Donald Trump at a downtown rally Thursday night, praising the president for standing behind law enforcement.

    “The mayor said the President wasn’t welcome but the Police Federation of Minneapolis begs to differ,” Kroll told the rally crowd.

    Kroll, the president of the Minneapolis Police Federation, wore a bright red “Cops for Trump” T-shirt, and spoke at Target Center about how the president supports police departments across the country as they face scrutiny following years of high-profile police shootings.

    “The Obama administration and the handcuffing and oppression of police was despicable,” Kroll said. “The first thing President Trump did when he took office was turn that around … he decided to start let cops do their job, put the handcuffs on the criminals instead of (on) us.”

    That would be the same president who likes to talk about “the good old days.”…see link…

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