I am beginning to think that we have a policing problem in this country

Dems are ready to vote yes on the bill, as soon as Republican Mitch McConnell brings it up for a vote in the Senate.

Why isn’t Donald Trump pressuring his party to bring up this bill for a vote? Why are Republicans dragging their feet?

He is…He’s leading the effort. I’m glad you agree with Trump.

Kinda belies your usual rhetoric that liberals would never give him credit for anything.

If he does something right, he gets credit for it. On this, he was right.

Too bad his own party doesnt want to vote on it. You should take this up with Mitch and Co.

Right. Kudos on Trump for wanting to do the right thing. If only he was the leader of the Republican Party and could use his weight in the party to pressure Senate Republicans to do the right thing. Honestly, his inability to affect his will in the Senate makes him seem weak.

Case by case. Some I’d trust with my life and career. Others I wouldn’t trust for a second.

Overall most cops don’t trust admin though because ultimately admin serves the interests of the employer, not the interests of justice. A cop can do everything right and be thrown under the bus if its politically expedient. Likewise a bad cop might get protected if that protection means hiding the bad thing that happened from the press.

Best piece of advice I ever got was “Don’t love your department because it will not love you back.” Took me a while until the wheels of politics nearly ground me up under it when the media took some shots at something I was involved in. I survived but I’ll never trust admin as an institution again though there are select members of it I might trust.

Ironically, a leader of the Republican party wouldn’t be pushing for it in the first place, which is part of the reason he was elected to begin with. People seem to keep forgetting that for some reason.

I’m sure they were just trying to help him establish his assumed ID’s street creeds. /s

Not sure what you mean. Just because the Don ran as a Republican, doesn’t mean he is one. Sanders ran as a Democrat, yet he isn’t part of that party either. It’s almost like you can’t get elected unless you run under one of those two parties or something…

He was the republican nominee for POTUS. That literally means he is a republican.

Um no, it really doesn’t. :roll_eyes:

Thank you, my friend, exactly the point I was trying to make. They’re can be good people within the institution but the institution itself is not to be trusted for political reasons.

I’ve known plenty of good cops and a few dirty ones and more brutal ones that I’m comfortable with but I saw a cop quoted once, I forget who, who said (paraphrased) that “Ten percent of cops are total straight arrows; ten percent are bad apples; and the other eighty percent follow the prevailing institutional culture.”

And if anyone has a good reason why I should trust the intentions of a police department as a whole more than actual cops do, I’d love to hear it.

You’re just now beginning to think this?

I’m actually surprised they don’t use a “color of the day” system like the NYPD does to prevent uniforms from accidentally shooting or otherwise jacking up plainclothes DTs.

I was being facetious

1 Like

:joy::joy::joy:

You are wrong, it’s a widespread culture in many local police forces.

One example; I recently did construction maintenance repairs at a nearby police station in a city of about a hundred thousand population. I was in every room in the place, including secure areas off limits to most. For days I heard conversations and backroom chatter, some of which I participated in. Little things like memes printed out and hung in offices and the nature of some jokes often went well beyond the kind of gallows humor one is sure to find in such a place.

Jokes about emptying out weapons and slapping in magazines just for the fun of the overkill were not uncommon.

Taken by itself one could easily dismiss a single incident like that, but after a few days it became apparent that this was the overriding attitude in general. Little things everywhere day in and day out. It didn’t really sink in until after the job was done looking back at it. It started to sink in that there were a lot of twisted messed up people working there and out on the streets with serious power at their beck and call. Power that is easily abused.

Serious, comprehensive and intrusive oversight at virtually all times is called for with such power. There are WAY more sick and twisted people in law enforcement than the public at large have any idea about

Gallows humor that the public wouldn’t understand or find acceptable is very common anyplace where you deal with wealths of human misery and / or stupidity 24/7.

Go hang out in an emergency room sometime and find out how the medical staff is talking about many of the patients behind their backs (I spend lots of time there on the job). Talking about over sedating patients to get them to shut up, mocking their fake tears and 10 ratings of pain on a minor injury, mocking their appearances, etc. Same with paramedics.

Or go hang out in retail or fast food (places I’ve also worked) and listen to all the morbid and black humor about things they would like to do to people’s food or people in general.

I think I made it pretty clear that I understand gallows humor just fine and that this went well beyond that. Not sure why you discount what I actually wrote.

Because in the real world these kind of things happen everywhere and its often a constant battle of one upping each other on how dark and black humor you can go. Everyone does it and its normal like I said in jobs dealing with constant human misery (police and medical fields) or human stupidity (police, medical, retail, and food service). Yet everyone pretends it doesn’t happen anywhere and they get so shocked and offended when they have an axe to grind.