Florida State Seminoles

[Owlman]

yet, without the video, most would have said it was justified.

[AlabamAlum]

Yep.

[Bklyn]

Yep. As I said, the relationship between the black community and police is impacted by this dynamic. You can't sit there and complain that people don't work with police without acknowledging that corruption and the Blue Wall erodes trust and contributes to the reluctance to support police.

The shooting and subsequent behavior was not new, it's safe to say. Having video is what's new.

[Jungle Rat]

Cincy cops are making a big stink about wearing body cams. They want to be paid more. Stupid.

[AlabamAlum]

Bklyn,

It's not just the blacks. I had a relative who was a police sergeant in the whitest area of an already predominantly white city. Visiting them as a young man was very illuminating. He personally used all of the stuff he confiscated (liquor, knives, guns, fireworks I know for sure, but probably drugs, as well). He would drink and drive, speed, get into fights, anything he wanted because the badge gave him immunity (he eventually rose to the rank of captain).

He always had a knife and a revolver in his glove box of his cruiser. I asked him why (I went on ride-alongs whith him a couple of times when he was the "field supervisor") and his reply was something like 'I never know when one of our officers or myself will have to shoot someone "armed".' This made no sense to me at first, bit I figured out what he meant.

As an ER RN, and ER Director, I worked fairly closely with police and saw some things...shortcuts, rules being broken and covered up, all while trying to bring the health care team into supporting them in some of this stuff jaded me a bit.

And I assume it's 20% of the police give the other 80% of them a bad name, but I honestly believe it is in suffcient proportion to be a big problem historically, and truth be told, it's likely now more the low socioeconomic status folks that get treated the worst, and less along racial lines. You're poor? Well, you're not gonna file an internal affairs complaint, you're not friends with the mayor or police chief, and you don't have the money to hire a lawyer to persue your complaints. So, some cops feel emboldened to do whatever they want to you.

[eCat]

economics and drugs.

someone poor gets a ticket for broken tail light and the cycle begins - pay the ticket or not put food on the table, outstanding warrants? ok, go to jail. Can't pay bail? lose your job.

now throw in that America has the stiffest drug laws in the world and its something like 1 in 100 people in the United States are in prison and about 47% people are in prison for non violent crimes.

At that point they are tainted goods in society with a 65% recidivism rate

[AlabamAlum]

Yeah. But even with drugs, it's along economic lines. Compare some of the sentences for powder cocaine vs crack cocaine or even pot.

I have had cops ask us to NOT run a tox screen or blood-alcohol labwork on someone who was involved in a major accident if they were well connected. Conversely, I have had them ask for the labwork even if there was no clear reason to do so.

We also have had a cop essentially ask that their own assessment of injuries be exaggerated if they had been in an altercation with someone they had arrested.

For that matter we had multiple cops who wanted to interrogate patients who were cuffed to a stretcher and had been given pain meds and in no condition to be questioned.


They usually got pissy in all the above incidences when we told them "no".

Don't get me wrong, I have seen good cops, too, but you gotta remember that the bad ones still have badges, guns, ticket books, night sticks, and handcuffs, and that they are in sufficient numbers to be an issue in certain communities. Makes me think of how many of my friends got upset with NWA's "Fuck tha Police", but if you understand where these (at the time) kids came from and what they saw there, you understood it.

[Bklyn]

I agree, AA

[hedge]

Along a couple of these lines but obviously with the stakes much lower, my DUI case from January 2015 was finally heard yesterday. The trooper outright lied on the stand, said I refused to to the eye test (lie), that I wobbled on the heel to toe (although for some odd reason he said I did the heel to toe action perfectly in both directions of the walk) and that I kept putting my toe down when I was supposed to be standing with one foot up. Said I was acting "belligerently". Said he did not let the MIF drive home after he took me away. And plenty more.

Now in theory I can understand how, after they've got your breathalyzer back at 0.8, they're going to try and pad the story in their favor even more, but come on, 0.8? I was barely buzzed at all (and honestly I rarely drive if I've been drinking at all these days and certainly not if I feel buzzed, which would be well over 0.8) and had not had a sip in over half an hour, but yet the trooper and then later the officer downtown who did the breathalyzer (which was another half hour later) both testified that they detected a strong odor of alcohol on me.

Well, whatever. Like I said, in theory I understand cops trying to pad their case, but when you're sitting there and you know they're lying thru their teeth (and you know that they know it), it kinda sucks. I had sat there in court all day watching these dudes (and gals) from county lockup come thru there in shackles on these petty charges and listening to the cops side of what went down and then their court appointed attorney make his spiel and then the judge sending them back to lockup for 60 days or whatever. Mostly they were black but there were also a good number of white trailer trash types. One of the latter was in for threatening his mom with a knife. Of course she was there trying to get him out. Judge asked if she wanted him to let her son out or if she wanted him to stay in jail. Basically said he'd do anything she said. She said let him out, she'd take him back. I suppose it's just like that every day in there...

Then I come up in coat and tie and my best-in-town lawyer who is also a fraternity brother (although we weren't in school at the same time) and whose uncle is a judge. He cross exams the cops, objects numerous times to the DA's questions (none of this happened with the county jail derelicts), raises all kinds of shit. Like the fact that the breathalyzer guy downtown also conducted an eye test on me although the trooper who brought me in hadn't read my my rights yet. I was thinking the whole time there was no way the judge wasn't going to find me guilty and also wondering why I had even been putting this off for 18 months and then, all of a sudden the judge says "not guilty" on all charges. I said "Thank you, your honor" and he told me to behave myself in the future and I said "Yes sir" and got the fuck outta there...

[Jungle Rat]

You should have been convicted and sent to prison to have your anus expanded.

[AlabamAlum]

Congrats, Hedge. Take an Uber next time.

[eCat]

its not a big surprise that well connected people get off

it absolutely is economics.

but if we're filling prisons up with non violent crimes - its drugs

[Jungle Rat]

Been on both ends. Montgomery cops loved me. Let me off. Warren County cops, not so much

[10ac]

.8? You should have been dead.

[eCat]

In addition to a sitting president calling a candidate unfit, as well as a supreme court justice, its pretty obvious to anyone paying attention this is the truth

--------------------------------

Donald Trump may or may not fix his campaign, and Hillary Clinton may or may not become the first female president. But something else happening before our eyes is almost as important: the complete collapse of American journalism as we know it.

The frenzy to bury Trump is not limited to the Clinton campaign and the Obama White House. They are working hand-in-hand with what was considered the cream of the nation’s news organizations.

The shameful display of naked partisanship by the elite media is unlike anything seen in modern America.

The largest broadcast networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — and major newspapers like The New York Times and Washington Post have jettisoned all pretense of fair play. Their fierce determination to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has no precedent.

Indeed, no foreign enemy, no terror group, no native criminal gang, suffers the daily beating that Trump does. The mad mullahs of Iran, who call America the Great Satan and vow to wipe Israel off the map, are treated gently by comparison.

By torching its remaining credibility in service of Clinton, the mainstream media’s reputations will likely never recover, nor will the standards. No future producer, editor, reporter or anchor can be expected to meet a test of fairness when that standard has been trashed in such willful and blatant fashion.

Liberal bias in journalism is often baked into the cake. The traditional ethos of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable leads to demands that government solve every problem. Favoring big government, then, becomes routine among most journalists, especially young ones.

I know because I was one of them. I started at the Times while the Vietnam War and civil-rights movement raged, and was full of certainty about right and wrong.

My editors were, too, though in a different way. Our boss of bosses, the legendary Abe Rosenthal, knew his reporters leaned left, so he leaned right to “keep the paper straight.”

That meant the Times, except for the opinion pages, was scrubbed free of reporters’ political views, an edict that was enforced by giving the opinion and news operations separate editors. The church-and-state structure was one reason the Times was considered the flagship of journalism.

Those days are gone. The Times now is so out of the closet as a Clinton shill that it is giving itself permission to violate any semblance of evenhandedness in its news pages as well as its opinion pages.

A recent article by its media reporter, Jim Rutenberg, whom I know and like, began this way: “If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?”

Whoa, Nellie. The clear assumption is that many reporters see Trump that way, and it is note­worthy that no similar question is raised about Clinton, whose scandals are deserving only of “scrutiny.” Rutenberg approvingly cites a leftist journalist who calls one candidate “normal” and the other ­“abnormal.”

Clinton is hardly “normal” to the 68 percent of Americans who find her dishonest and untrustworthy, though apparently not a single one of those people writes for the Times. Statistically, that makes the Times “abnormal.”

Also, you don’t need to be a ­detective to hear echoes in that first paragraph of Clinton speeches and ads, including those featured prominently on the Times’ Web site. In effect, the paper has seamlessly ­adopted Clinton’s view as its own, then tries to justify its coverage.

It’s an impossible task, and Rutenberg fails because he must. Any reporter who agrees with Clinton about Trump has no business covering either candidate.

It’s pure bias, which the Times fancies itself an expert in detecting in others, but is blissfully tolerant of its own. And with the top political editor quoted in the story as ­approving the one-sided coverage as necessary and deserving, the prejudice is now official policy.

http://nypost.com/2016/08/21/american-j ... -our-eyes/

-----------------

Cokie Roberts, the daughter of a Louisiana democratic politician, feels she has the bully pulpit to say that anyone who supports Trump is morally tainted.


and don't get me wrong - I'm not a Fox News Acoloyte. They are the worst but that's really part of my point. Trump says and does a lot of stupid shit, but so far, he's not even in the same world of corruption and scofflaw that Clinton represents. The American people aren't excited about Hillary and they fully understand what she is and what she represents, but the media believes they have an obligation to think for the masses - to shape an election and their priorities - the transgender laws are a perfect example - and Target fell victim to buying into the media's full frontal attack on anyone to didn't buy into the "right" way of thinking. Now Target is dealing with the backlash of following the enlightened, trying to capitalize on the cutting edge of the media message. Their attempt to be on the right side of the American conscience is costing them $20m in renovations and a significant drop in revenue, mainly because they ignored the bell shaped curved of America demographics. In this case the people feeling slighted are a very small percentage of the overall population and the people feeling ...lets say "uneasy" about the proposed solutions represented a much, much larger percentage of the American population - and consequently their buying public at large.

Trump may not even come close to winning, but whoever said these people aren't going away are right - and the more the media tries to silence them, I think the more resolved they get.

The past 8 years has been about giving priority to the have nots at the expense of the haves - and by definition the haves are not the wealthiest 10% as they want you think but also the remaining 40-50% of the middle class, the 97% that is heterosexual, the 60% that think that border control and tougher immigration should be a priority, and the 49% of Americans who have employer sponsored health care that are not eligible for tax credits but have to live with the increased cost due to the mandates of Obamacare. That 51% of Americans representing the middle class, after adjusting for inflation, that on average hasn't seen a wage increase in 15 years are just expected to absorb that and feel good about their forced altruistic support of the overall well being of this country.

Those people are pissed and they are really pissed at the media telling them how wrong they are for the way they think. Its not only a bias or shaping of opinion, its a credibility issue. Thanks to the internet, people are now more aware of concepts on how the message is tailored, edited or or outright fabricated to push an agenda in the media.

[Owlman]

I guess Trump plays no role in the bad press he's getting.

[hedge]

Been on both ends. Montgomery cops loved me. Let me off. Warren County cops, not so much

Not surprising to hear you admit you've been on both ends...

[eCat]

I guess Trump plays no role in the bad press he's getting.

I didn't say that - but they worry more about what he says and alot less about what Hillary has done. Its agenda driven.

[Owlman]

When you say outlandish things, don't be surprised at the amount of press. When you say multiple outlandish things, that's even more press. When you then double down and triple-down on those things, you get talked about all the time. When you keep doing those things over months and months, it's pretty common. You can read about the things that Hillary has done, it just keeps getting drowned out by the new things that Trump seems to do every day. The best thing Hillary can do is shut up, let Trump be Trump.

[eCat]

When you say outlandish things, don't be surprised at the amount of press. When you say multiple outlandish things, that's even more press. When you then double down and triple-down on those things, you get talked about all the time. When you keep doing those things over months and months, it's pretty common. You can read about the things that Hillary has done, it just keeps getting drowned out by the new things that Trump seems to do every day. The best thing Hillary can do is shut up, let Trump be Trump.

I'm not buying it