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Let's talk shitty policing!
The story starts back in August, when police (specifically, Adams County Sherriff's Department of Ohio) raided the home of Joseph "Afroman" Foreman on a warrant for narcotics and kidnapping. Perhaps they thought that the author of "Because I got high" would be a slam dunk, but they walked out with a couple roaches and a few grand in cash.
https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/adams-county/rapper-afromans-ohio-home-raided-by-adams-county-sheriffs-office
When they discovered a grand total of jack and shit, they were forced to return most of the money, except the stuff they stole.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/adams-county-sheriff-comes-up-400-short-returning-cash-to-afroman-after-home-raid/ar-AA14IJPa
Reason covered the case here:
https://reason.com/2022/12/05/cops-return-cash-seized-from-afroman-in-bogus-drug-raid-with-400-missing/
And the man himself has weighed in with a music video that is all security footage of the raid titled "Will you help me repair my door?"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oponIfu5L3Y
Down with qualified immunity, the legalized piracy known as civil asset forfeiture, and the self-funding militarized security state.
I despair for the cause of police reform. There was a window where it might have been possible, but anywhere past the 2000s I just don't see it happening.
Put frankly, nobody really cares about this man. Nobody really cares about the median CAF victims: poor people, strippers, general lower-class coded individuals. Nobody really cares about people jailed on bogus charges, put through the justice wringer for ill-conceived reason, or shot to death by trigger-happy psychopaths. It's the just world fallacy in full effect: they probably had it coming anyway.
The median voter has never in his life gotten in trouble with the police. You'd need a hundred Uvaldes to meaningfully dent this - the sorts of tragedy I wouldn't wish on any nation. The median voter is a middle-aged comfortable person with a steady job and living who thinks everything in society basically works as it should. Oh, sure, some politicians are greedy, the kids these days are bad, but the police? Protect and serve. They keep us safe and things steady and that's all we want. If they beat up or imprison or kill someone, well, I guess that's just what their job is.
I don't know what any one nation can hope to do about this, for as long as the median age in wealthy countries keeps rising. The people who vote don't care, the people who get elected have no reason to care, and the police have made more than clear they have negative interest in policing their own.
What's a downtrodden person to do? What is anyone to do? For as long as the median voter really loves the police, I don't know that I see a way out.
I don't. It just got conflated with anti-white racism for a few decades, but if we can ever end that shit, I think police reform is a real possibility.
I live in a nation where the anti-white racism thing functionally doesn't exist. If anything, it's made the pro-reform block smaller. I just don't think you're right.
Do you also live in a nation where the primary victims of police malfeasance (by raw numbers) have been so thoroughly erased from the discussion by the "pro-reform" block that most of that block think they are actually the most privileged demographic when it comes to police/justice system encounters?
Does being "erased from the discussion" matter more than the actual injustice being committed in the first place? Also the discussion isn't erased, you are having the discussion right now and we both seemed to be able to find out about white people getting fucked over by the police just fine. Should we let the police slide because MSN talked about the wrong cases too much?
The ways progressives talk about police reform to combat injustice make me believe that they think it is fine to "let police slide" when it is people like me who are impacted by it, that it is not actually injustice in that case. If you want me to support your solution to "actual injustice", you damn well better prove to me that the injustices committed against my demographic are also going to be solved by it. Progressives seem to go out of their way to avoid doing so and expect to gain my support solely through emotional blackmail. Fuck that.
It doesn't matter what the progressives talk about. The police aren't progressives, the voters by and large aren't either, and nobody is capable of criminalizing being white. Using twitter progs as an excuse to do nothing about real police overreach seems like looking for an excuse to me.
As a whole, true, but I think you need to look specifically at the areas that have the biggest crime problems. Someone who happily lives in the suburbs has almost no say over what policing looks like in the urban core.
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I wouldn't care what progressives talk about if they also didn't come in and disrupt local government planning meetings, sabotaging years of bipartisan efforts that had been steadily making progress (eg, on topics like @what_a_maroon brought up) by being an intransigent minority insisting that any solution involve directly confronting racism and sexism.
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I get that it's real satisfying to talk shit about your outgroup, but I really don't care about that. I want for policing to be just, and the American custom of anti-white racism just isn't a factor.
What country are you in?
I'm from the Netherlands.
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Everyone just wants policing to be "just". The problem is that not everyone agrees on how to make policing more "just" or even what "just" policing is. The "pro-reform" block in the US currently claims that the primary reason that policing is unjust is racism and sexism, and thus focus on policies that they believe would reduce racism and sexism. They also claim that white men, the largest demographic victimized by police malfeasance, categorically cannot be victims of racism or sexism. They regularly erase them from narratives about justice reform (eg see my comment on the old site discussing declining white support for BLM) and strongly overestimate victimization of other groups. Do you really think that alienating the largest group of victims by implying their victimization is "just", unlike the "unjust" victimization of other demographics, and downplaying their victimization while exaggerating others' "just isn't a factor"?
While there's certainly a lot of that, I think a lot of the policies that are proposed actually are orthogonal to the -ism angle. Yes, hiring more black or female cops is unlikely to do anything. But things like removing qualified immunity and civil asset forfeiture, body camera policies with actual teeth, a separate body and prosecutor for investigating allegations, etc. would help all victims of police abuse.
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Yeah. Cool. And if the pro-reform block didn't do these things - such as they don't here, because white people are (even more of) a majority of people around, they'd still get nowhere. It's a red herring. Take away BLM, take away the Bezos-sponsored Huffington post-tier editorials, take away the identity politics, and you still don't get reform. It just isn't the kind of cause normal people are going to identify with, because the chief victims of this injustice aren't average people so much as those down on their luck.
Well, no, the chief victims of police injustice are the perpetually badly behaved who are not serious criminals. Saying that they are ‘down on their luck’ implies they have ever had good luck.
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We WERE getting some reform. Body cameras were the main thing driving it; either cops were behaving better with the cameras or the cameras exposed that there was a less of a problem than expected; either way, they were having an effect. BLM opposes body cameras.
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