JUST SAYING
BY RAUL HERNANDEZ
When communities try to hold police
accountable, law enforcement fights back
Civilian oversight is undermined by politicians and police, who contend citizens are ill-equipped to judge officers
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Here are some suggestions of what communities can do to hold police accountable:
Weed out the thugs with guns and badges by firing them.
Break up the Ole Boy Club Houses headquarters at the police departments throughout the nation. Incompetent police chiefs are being promoted within police departments, so nobody is ever held accountable.
Vote out politicians in the back pockets of police unions and thumb their noses at legitimate complaints by citizens against cops. Many of these complaints against cops are made at City Council meetings.
Hold accountable District Attorney’s Offices that consistently excuse and never prosecute police officers for brutality or the killing of unarmed people.
Start looking at the terms and fine print of police union contracts signed by the Mayor and City Council members. Find out if there is a pattern of extravagant union perks and outrageous overtime. This money could go to other programs in the community for young or older people.
Find out who on City Council keeps getting the police union’s endorsements and campaign contributions. How are these council members voting on policing, and what are their views on police misconduct and brutality?
Make citizen complaints against police public records along with statistics from Internal Affairs investigations.
Start launching Department of Justice investigations throughout the country against problematic police departments. These investigations were done in the past but discontinued by the Trump administration.
Hold the local media accountable. When was the newspaper or TV station in your city published or aired a story about police brutality or how cop complaints are handled?
Reporters and editors, especially those on local TV, tend to be lazy. They would instead report feel-good, happy news than serious stories.
Call local news networks and newspapers and ask to speak to the editors.
If they ignore the community, cancel subscriptions, or boycott TV advertisers.
Washington Post Editorial Opinion: The Supreme Court calls a halt to its progress on juvenile sentencing
On Thursday, The court stopped progressing on this moderate and humane road. By a vote of 6 to 3, the justices ruled that states are not obligated to make a legal finding that a juvenile defendant is “permanently incorrigible” before imposing life without parole — even though common sense, and some of the court’s own past words, suggest that’s what locking a child up forever means, according to the Washington Post.
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JUST SAYING
The Supreme Court’s 6 to 3 decision is draconian. It allows state judges to look into crystal balls without relying on factual evidence to sentence a juvenile to spend the rest of his life inside a cage.
The only way out of prison is in a body bag.
Had robed clown Kavanaugh, who “loved beer” and enjoyed attending parties during his younger years, plowed into and killed a family of four in an SUV while DUI, right about now, he would be up for parole. In California, if this is a second DUI, it could result in murder charges and decades in prison.
Would society be safe if young Kavanaugh would have been locked up without the possibility of parole? Some would argue that yes because of where Kavanaugh ended up.
Let’s face it. Most of us have done things as kids that would have landed us in prison for a long time.
Kavanaugh notes that a juvenile can always file a petition for clemency. Even after weighing a prison record that indicates that an inmate has been a model prison and has earned degrees in college, most governors will not grant clemency.
This is because most governors and state legislators, especially Republicans, don’t have the testosterone to be fair and compassionate. These are the people who cage children.
It would be political suicide to do so.
The political knives will come out. TV ads that a governor or state legislator is “soft on crime” and lets out crazed killers out of prison.
Politicians know their audience: Skittish voters scared of their own shadows and bum-rush the toilet paper aisles at the grocery store.
Kavanaugh’s judicial ruling is limited to his white-gated-community view of the world and grasp of this fact: A young brain doesn’t mature until the mid-to-late 20s. This means teens are more likely to engage in risky behaviors without considering the potential results of their decision, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-teen-brain-7-things-to-know/index.shtml
All rise.
Washington Post Opinion: The hidden scam behind Tucker Carlson and the right’s ‘replacement’ game
GEORGE FLOYD’S BLOOD ON PROSECUTORS, POLICE CHIEFS AND COP UNIONS
Many killings of unarmed people like Mr. George Floyd by police would have never happened if not for unscrupulous prosecutors, police chiefs, and police union officials.
Some police chiefs hold press conferences and explain away beatings or shootings by lying, hiding the facts, or a rubber-stamped shoddy investigation by Internal Affairs.
Inept and unethical prosecutors, for decades, have never filed criminal charges against thugs with guns and police badges who beat, kill and maim unarmed and sometimes handcuffed people.
Yet, District Attorneys and city officials love to pose and get endorsements with police union officials to show voters how tough they are on crime.
In return for endorsements, police unions can negotiate with municipalities contracts with lucrative terms, including generous perks, pensions, and salaries.
Undoubtedly, good cops are worth their weight in gold and should get good salaries and pensions for years of serving the public.
So why rock the status quo?
Besides, the DA’s office relies on police testimony/evidence to put criminals in jail, including the statements of bad officers who lie and plant evidence.
And, a guilty plea is a guilty plea, right? Chalk one up for the good guys.
We all know that some racists, psychopaths, thugs, and crazies with badges are in good standing with the unions. Some are even elected union officials.
Through the years, police unions have never seen a beating or a shooting of an unarmed person that can be explained away. Everything can be defended.
I wonder why? Who wants to argue with that?
Politicians? District Attorneys? The voters who want to be repeatedly told that they aren’t going to be mugged or killed if they venture outside their homes?
I am aware of some of these policing problems.
I covered the local, state, and federal courts in three cities for 18 years during three decades of being a newspaper reporter at four newsrooms in Texas and California.
There are also facts, plenty of them, like the ones from a joint study by the Police Integrity Research Group with Bowling Green State University and the Washington Post:
Since the beginning of 2005 (through June 24, 2019), there have been 104 nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers who have been arrested for murder or manslaughter resulting from an on-duty police fatal shooting, the report states.
Of those 104 officers, to date, only 35 have been convicted of a crime resulting from the on-duty shooting (15 by guilty plea, 20 by jury trial, and none convicted by a bench trial).
In the cases where an officer has been convicted, it is often for a lesser offense. Only 4 officers have been convicted of murder (there were four officers whose murder convictions were overturned, but the officers were later convicted of federal crimes arising out of the same incident).
According to the joint research report, the 4 officers convicted of murder received incarceration sentences that ranged from six years to 16 years in prison, with an average length prison sentence of 12 years.
Derek Chauvin, a veteran cop, knew many of these facts and decided to do busy as usual in the Hood.
The court evidence indicates that it took Derek Chauvin with other police officers standing around and cell phone cameras recording nine minutes to kill George Floyd in broad daylight.
Good people begged and pleaded for Chauvin to stop and let a handcuffed man breathe.
Chauvin’s sadistic expression while his knee was on George Floyd looked like a bird of prey with his claw on a rabbit’s neck, waiting for the animal to stop moving.
Confident of his sanctioned power to brutalize and kill unarmed people with impunity as long as he said the magic words: The suspect was resisting, and I felt my life was in danger.
This time, however, he got it all wrong. It took a teen with a cell phone camera along with police body cameras to put an end to
one cop’s reign of terror.
I would like to be in the DA’s office when the report on Mr. Floyd’s slaying, along with the camera recordings, landed at the DA’s office.
What does this say about policing in America?
Why aren’t those with the power to stop it being held accountable?