We need good police. We don’t want bad policing. Police departments across America apparently are dealing with staffing shortages, partly because cops are quitting. NBC News aired a segment about this on Sunday, November 27, 2022 (watch it below). In that report, NBC News interviewed several f[...]
Posts Tagged ‘Police Brutality’
October 26th, 2022 - 10:56 am § in Law and Courts, Politics
Fire this cop
The Tulsa PD put him on “restrictive duty,” but that’s not enough. A police badge is the power of the state. It’s dangerous in the wrong hands. Do you want your city patrolled by someone who tells a Citizen Police Academy class, “Nothing is more dangerous to America tha[...]
April 27th, 2022 - 8:51 pm § in Misc.
Seattle suburb settles police shooting for $7.5 million
The facts are complicated. Andrea Churna (photo, left), 39, daughter of a retired Michigan state police commander, and ex-wife of a Microsoft lawyer, kept a gun in her Redmond, Washington, apartment because she thought she was being stalked. On the night of September 20, 2020, she called police beca[...]
April 17th, 2022 - 2:46 pm § in News Media, Politics
Another shooting, another GOP rant without solutions
Forgive me for yawning; I can’t help it. This is getting tiresome. As you know, a 62-year-old drifter wounded 10 people on a New York City subway last week. Police quickly arrested him, and we know he has a dozen prior misdemeanor arrests. He’s almost certainly mentally ill, but was able[...]
Chief hired to reform America’s worst police department fired; did the police union get her?
Aurora, Colorado, arguably has America’s worst police department. Its cops are infamous. Their own chief calls them “despicable.” So begins a posting I wrote last year (read it here). Then, Aurora PD was back in the news because of yet another police brutality incident. Now, because the ci[...]
April 5th, 2022 - 12:49 pm § in Law and Courts
Don’t blame cops if it’s not their fault
In my role as a contributing writer for this blog, I’ve repeatedly criticized bad cops (e.g., here), and frequently called for better recruiting, training, supervision, and discipline of police officers. But we shouldn’t stereotype all cops as racist or trigger-happy. Some are, and polic[...]
March 20th, 2022 - 1:39 pm § in Racism
Yet another black man is shot by rogue police
“A Black man in New Jersey grabbing iced tea from a car was shot and paralyzed by plain-clothed officers last month,” NBC News reported on March 18, 2022 (story here). Jajuan R. Henderson, 29, was inside the car, which was parallel-parked outside his Trenton home, shortly after midnight on F[...]
February 10th, 2022 - 10:46 pm § in Law and Courts
Police killed 1,055 people in 2021
There’s no official tracking of police shootings in the U.S., but the Washington Post makes an effort to collect and compile data. In case you’re interested, here are their numbers, as reported by Daily Mail (here): Police fatally shot 1,055 people in 2021, up from 1,021 in 2020. Of the[...]
February 2nd, 2022 - 12:16 pm § in Law and Courts
Cop gets 2 years in prison for clubbing protester
It was May 3, 2020, a few weeks after Breonna Taylor, an innocent black woman, was killed by police shooting into her apartment. Protests against her death, and other killings of black people by police, were occurring. In Louisville, Kentucky, where Taylor was killed, a protester “was kneeling[...]
January 29th, 2022 - 12:15 pm § in Law and Courts, Racism
Teaching right from wrong
A lawyer representing one of the Minneapolis cops present when Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd is blaming inadequate training, Huffington Post reported on Saturday, January 29, 2022 (read story here). The three ex-cops, who are being prosecuted for federal civil rights, didn’t just watch w[...]