I disagree with the War on Drugs, but I understand the political process that keeps us saddled with it despite its obvious stupidity and counter-productivity.

But I can't understand the police's change in strategy, so that paramilitary force becomes the default approach, rather than something that's wielded when the situation seems to demand it.

In other words, kicking doors down makes cops feel like righteous warriors, writing tickets in pot shops makes them feel like asshole tattletales. They pick the strategy that makes it easiest to live with themselves. It has nothing to do with the optimal strategy to counteract the violation of law.

Do you think the cop who said "I was about to kick her in her fucking nub" is constructing a deep narrative about how she's a just warrior fighting for righteousness and the American way?

I think the most insightful part of this whole video is when they use the battering ram (ineffectively) on the pull door in the beginning, TWICE, and then just open the door.

There is nothing deep there. They just want to feel dominant because they've long ago overcome the instinctive aversion to conflict humans feel. Human nature, or rather, human evolution and culture, is not predisposed to violence, and the only way to construct people like this is through extensive training, over the course of years, and continued throughout their career, to mold them into remorseless killing machines. This training takes away the nausea of seeing a human life extinguished and replaces it with the adrenaline of a successful kill.

This mindset is far from accidental -- do you think the people who run police departments would allow something that seems this uncontrollable just happen? It's not like there's a huge labor shortage right now or anything, police departments could easily fire enough people to make examples. But that doesn't happen.

No, this is not a quirk of psychology, this is not a coping mechanism. This is a conscious choice by your leaders to build exactly this world. This is the world they are voting for. A boot, kicking a disabled woman's amputated leg, forever.

Police abuse plenty of people even without "drugs" in the picture.

Bug guns are fun toys.

Video is helping with the first, but as can be seen by many people's reactions to all this stuff, doesn't work as well as it should for the latter two.

Also, if those recordings are deemed "illegal"and dismissed because the cops didn't know, does that mean any jerk who robs a store with hidden security cameras can claim the same?

> On-duty police officers appear to be eating edible pot products—OC Weekly transcribes words they spoke while egging one another on. (“Those candy bars are pretty good,” one said. “I kinda feel light-headed though.”) Other dialogue offers a number of insights into the subculture of this narcotics unit. Take the woman with an amputated leg that police encountered on entering the dispensary. “Did you punch that one-legged old benita?” one police officer asks another. The other cop laughingly replied, “I was about to kick her in her fucking nub.” These are people Santa Ana taxpayers empower to use lethal force at their discretion.

> The lawsuit argues that the video doesn’t paint a fair version of events. The suit also claims the video shouldn’t be used as evidence because, among other things, the police didn’t know they were on camera. “All police personnel present had a reasonable expectation that their conversations were no longer being recorded and the undercover officers, feeling that they were safe to do so, removed their masks,” says the suit.

> The dispensary also did not obtain consent of any officer to record them, the suit says. “Without the illegal recordings, there would have been no internal investigation of any officer,” the suit says.

Its pretty clear behavior like this and:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9948255

Is simply, horrifically common among law enforcement. :/

Torrent: https://archive.org/download/SantaAnaPotShopRaidSparksInvest...

Don't think I'm agreeing with the behavior at all, just voicing a thought.

One of the projects on my todo list is a site that allows a group of people, especially people who aren't great writers on their own, or don't have the time to be, to "make a case", to collaboratively and systematically build that case and hone its articulation.

If successful it would be a kind of Wikipedia/GitHub of arguments. So instead of everyone trying to re-explain or re-argue a point each time there is a need, they could link to the canonical explanation. So instead of off-the-cuff and incomplete, or un-expert and flawed arguments, a point of view's "best foot" is always put forward.

"Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish defines chutzpah as "gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible 'guts', presumption plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to". In this sense, chutzpah expresses both strong disapproval and condemnation. In the same work, Rosten also defined the term as "that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan". Chutzpah amounts to a total denial of personal responsibility, that renders others speechless and incredulous ... one cannot quite believe that another person totally lacks common human traits like remorse, regret, guilt, sympathy and insight. The implication is at least some degree of psychopathy in the subject, as well as the awestruck amazement of the observer at the display."

- Wikipedia (because The Joys of Yiddish unfortunately isn't online) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chutzpah

And I disagree. The size and scope of the entity representing the employer and the size and scope of the entity representing the employee should be similar in scale. It's the only reasonable way to curtail abuses arising from imbalances in political power.

For government workers, there is effectively only one employer. It is entirely reasonable for those employees to band together into one union. Or three. Or ten. That tenth one might not be all that effective, but collective bargaining as a labor cartel should be equally accessible to everyone, regardless of who their employer may be.

If one union behaves badly, it should be perfectly acceptable for the employer to blacklist their members from future employment or contract renewals. In the case where the union is defending the indefensible--the open and notorious police misconduct seen in the video--the right thing to do would be to just stop employing their members.

In trying to save the jobs of a handful of bad cops, this union is damaging the collective reputation of all police in the entire country, along with the criminal justice system. The behavior in the video is reminiscent of Hollywood motion picture depictions of organized crime crews shaking down business owners for protection money.

Not all unions are bad, but this one sure is.

OK, eww, yeah, Walker was wrong then.

Fundamentally, forming a union is an act against your employer's interests. When your employer is a private entity, that's not a big deal. It's a dispute between two private parties, let them hash it out amongst themselves.

But when your employer is the government, forming a union is an act against the public's interests. Public servants should never, ever be allowed to act against the public's interests under any circumstances. And this goes double when your job is a fundamental part of public safety. It's why Reagan fired the air traffic controllers: because such a group going on strike is a direct attack on public safety. Imagine if there was a police department that actually did their jobs instead of choking black people to death on the streets; now imagine that "good" police department suddenly went on strike because of a pay dispute. Imagine how many people calling 911 for domestic violence, home invasions, etc. would be completely and thoroughly screwed.

Police unions simply are incompatible with public safety.

~If the cops go on strike, we can always contract city security out to OCP and their clever robots.~

Walker believes every public servant... (Other than Police and Firemen)... should be prevented from unionizing.

And that's not a bad thing. Proper legal defense is an extremely important and fundamental right, even for the people we dislike. Adequate legal defense is often how people end up needing to protect themselves from crooked cops.

If this crazy request is honored, then something is broke.

If the union does not have standards of professional conduct that would allow them to expel a cop for blatant, open, and notorious destruction of private property, unlawful conversion, spoliation of evidence, deprivation of rights under color of law, and grossly unprofessional and unethical conduct, why the heck would any county or municipality hire any of their members?

Most unions can kick you out when shown good cause, including for actions that are neither illegal nor unethical, such as joining a competing union.

This is probably something the union should have backed away from, as it makes their entire membership look like they support corruption in policing.

That is even more frightening. The union already has tremendous opportunity to negotiate for the rights of some members by giving up on the rights of other members. If it could pick and choose which cases were "really worth it" it would end up defending organizational insiders while declining to defend Joe Sixpack.

One positive thing unions provide is that they provide a valuable way for workers to know about and exercise their legal rights. If different kind of organization were providing that benefit, it woulLd still be defending workers accused of bad things.

"Even those accused of REALLY bad things?"

Especially those accused of really bad thing

There is no dispute that the cops in the video did what they were recorded in doing. The argument is literally that the prosecutors should not consider the publicly available evidence when determining whether the cops should be charged with a crime.

The union is not bound by the state's rules of evidence. It can make an independent assessment of the facts available to it and decide whether the union would be better served by keeping those guys in it and defending them to the last, or by cutting them loose and preserving its reputation for the remaining members.

It is all down to the operating principles ensconced in its own articles of organization.

What goes beyond the pale? If Joe Sixpack sat down and ate a live baby, feet first, and it was caught on video, which then went viral on YouTube, would the union still go to bat for him?

I don't care what these cops or their privately-funded lawyers say.

But I do care that I have to fund this idiocy.

I'm sure we're in different communities, but surely there are a lot of "mainstream leftists" with lots of public visibility? And I haven't seen "unions are always correct" expressed by public figures.

That comment is rather weird. It seems to be saying basically, "The cops are entitled to a legal defense, therefore a legal defense is good. This is a legal defense, therefore this is good."

But the problem is not really that the union is legally defending these officers (if that is in fact part of their responsibilities then it's only reasonable that they should do so) but that they're doing it crazily. Filing a lawsuit to suppress good evidence from being used in an internal investigation is not a reasonable legal defense in my eyes.

Anyway, I don't know that that comment qualifies as "anything the union does is fine," unless that was actually supposed to be a parody of something less extreme.