Either way, if its not these more local gangs, its the nationwide fraternities which arguably serve the same kind of function. So there isn't really like a way out either way.
I would say overcoming that mentality is one of the most important things for which our society could strive.
And it's not like we have any historical precedence for a police force being different than this either, its just how it always been. You can't blame them for doing their jobs!
Policing like we do it today in the West with state employees going looking for violations of law didn't exist before the surpluses of the industrial revolution enabled the high touch administrative state.
In the 18th and 19th century there were far, far fewer professional local/county "police", many of the duties were performed by other offices/officials and when needed they got their muscle from community volunteers or the state (usually from the national guard or army in the US). Consequently they didn't spend much time enforcing petty civil laws and enforcing social norms because the manpower simply wasn't there and you couldn't afford to piss off the fraction of people such enforcement pisses off.
(Obviously this all varies by country and year so I'm speaking generally)
It often used to be up to the victim to pursue justice.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thief-taker
There are obvious problems with this approach.
Would note that this isn’t infiltration by street gangs as much as deputies forming gangs.
> state and county level, people just kind of ignore it
I am from the Bay Area. This is the first I’m hearing about it. I do wish we had a more neutral source than the Rolling Stone.
Here's a 50-page summary from Loyola Law School: https://lmu.app.box.com/s/uci2ir4mkpudtvvfp7z8iu4kv1gre1dj
You can see that Rolling Stone skews left and is lower than the peak of reliability.
I dont understand how you can claim media bias is at the core of this story.
> Define "neutral" and I can find one
I think I misunderstood their comment to say "I don't understand why you are claiming Rolling Stone is not neutral". Sorry.
That said, I find it rather odd the absolute highest quality news achievable is...ABC15 in Arizona. Kinda feel they should leave local stations off altogether.
The wikipedia article on this cites several reputable looking sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs
This list isn't exhaustive but many of these are civilian gangs, so it's probably a case of both.
There are of course corrupt members of law enforcement who collaborate with organized crime for various nefarious purposes, but the in-department gangs are a distinct issue.
It specifically mentions armed services, police, and firefighters are not civilians.
Civilian in law enforcement jargon means a non-sworn position: https://www.discoverpolicing.org/explore-the-field/civilian-...
To make this more interesting, Posse Comitatus employs the language to signal "non-Federal forces" eg: National Guard activated by a state to operate domestically are referred to as "civilian law enforcement".
In any of the above cases, calling LEOs civilians would be incorrect and would eschew them of many of their responsibilities.
It very much is gangs infiltrating LAPD and SO.
On top of that, they also have their own cliques or gangs that form within.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs
I haven’t seen any reports in Bay Area papers but it’s been reported on in LA. It’s been local news. Similarly Californian don’t hear about >90% of the scandals in Chicago.
The corruption in southland policing departments is absolutely nothing new. Rampart comes easily to mind here, but the list is unfortunately a long one and wikipedia has many documented examples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_scandal
Rampart, for instance, was such a large media issue that they even made a movie about it. Not a small one either: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1640548/
EDIT: Dorner should also ring a lot of bells too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Dorner_shootings_a...
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/p9a1v/im_woody_harrel...
How about that outstanding episode:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Resources_Against_St...
Well documented and was the base for "GTA San Andreas" and "Training Day". And even though it has been 20 years now, the problem seems far from solved.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Riders-Come-Out-a...
Well, I’m sure not only in America-a lot of developing countries I wouldn’t be surprised if such things existed too-but not the countries the US would want to be compared to
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I can certainly speak to that effect as a Canadian aware of at least one similar 'police gang'
What’s it called? Where is it?
In short, this is treated as an acceptable trade-off for enforcing the hierarchies of power.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Dorner_shootings...
How? Even a victim suit against department would likely be tossed out due to USSC 'qualified immunity'.
Why don’t you unpack that statement in the context of LA. The “hierarchies of power” you’re talking about here is the civilian government having control over organized crime.
I can make up numbers too.
Robbery is down 76% compared with 1928 and assaults are down by 22%! Incredible!
We are more connected now than ever and fear porn is streamed into homes 24/7. Perception may have changed due to a new influx of biased information and looking at historical trend is the only rational way to measure progress.
7 years is not a long time.
> You can see this playing out right now in cities like Chicago, Atlanta, New York City, etc., where mayors have been defeated or come into power because people are outraged by the increase in crime.
We are talking about people voting because they are outraged due to recent crime
Chicago has much more to do with outgoing mayor Lightfoot's across-the-board negatives --- with her handling of the school system, with her COVID handling, and with her handling of the police department --- than it is a straightforward reaction to crime.
They're outraged due to recent outrage about crime, which has absolutely nothing to do with recent crime levels and everything to do with recent outrage levels. It's entirely manufactured.
Saying people are not outraged about crime, but are outraged about outrage of crime is a little silly. The other side of that coin would just be that people hear more about it and are more informed. So attributing outrage to a media coverage conspiracy is not really meaningful (not to mention difficult to prove) because people are allowed to be outraged at what they want. One could even say the news covers what people are interested in, which is a classic chicken vs. the egg case in this context.
The actual data is more important, and for many cities, it is trending up recently.
It's true that he won 67% of the vote in the actual election [0]. But this was effectively a foregone conclusion -- his Republican opponent, Curtis Sliwa, was a man best known for owning 15 cats [1] and faking his own kidnapping [2].
The "real" election was the primary -- notably the first ever election in the city to make use of ranked-choice voting. Wiley and Garcia, the runners-up in the first round, effectively split the "progressive" vote 50/50. Morales was a significant progressive up until a few weeks before the election, at which time her campaign staff walked out citing poor working conditions, effectively ending her campaign.
Looking at the final-round vote tally [3], it was 404,513 for Adams and 397,316 for Garcia -- a difference of just 7,197. He won, but just by the skin of his teeth. The population of NYC in 2021 was 8,468,000, with 4,992,792 registered to vote [4]. That doesn't exactly paint the picture of a resounding victory and a mandate to crack down on ne'er-do-wells that the Post would have you believe. It starts to look a bit more like a perceived centrist barely squeaking through by merit of being the best-known/least-objectionable candidate.
This of course speaks to OP's point: do the public really crave a paternalistic figure who will come and "crack down on crime" (i.e. sign off on more... questionable overtime pay for the NYPD) or is there, for some reason, undue weight given to the narrative that just by happenstance sounds identical to SBA/PBA talking points?
[0] https://www.cnn.com/election/2021/results/new-york-city/mayo...
[1] https://nypost.com/2021/06/23/an-inside-look-into-curtis-sli...
[2] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-11-25-mn-1060-s...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/22/us/elections/...
[4] https://vote.nyc/sites/default/files/pdf/vote/2021/county_fe...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/harvey-weinsteins-a...
Imagine there wasn’t a rule of law at all and no police officers. A gang of “baddies” forms. What would be a natural response to the formation of that gang? Wouldn’t it be a gang of “also baddies but baddies whose interests align more closely with ours?”
I've thought about this here and there too, with the framing of "how do we break the cycle of violence", or "if we always require a bigger bad to defeat a bad, aren't we doomed to depend on the bad?" My latest thought experiment was the dynamic where electorates sometimes make Faustian bargains with strongman dictators to solve an urgent problem (economic destruction, raids, social change) but then they get stuck with an even worse problem: a brutal dictatorship. A couple of things I think:
- Violence is downstream of trauma. Stop the trauma, stop the violence. Frustratingly this can be relative because status factors in (in 800 AD maybe you got called out for your jank farming tools, now you get called out for your year-old shoes), so there's a cultural component to solve as well. But yeah, generally avoid catastrophes (invest in mitigations like levees, heterogeneous crops, insurance, and a free press) and lean on your culture when you can't (community disaster relief for hurricanes, draft every capable person to kick Putin the fuck out of your country, etc.)
- If you can't nip trauma in the bud, you can mob a big bad with lots of small violent actions. Like it doesn't matter how good Putin is at judo; if 1000 clumsy townspeople show up he's going down.
But like, we know how these things happen, all the way down from dictatorships to street gangs. They're ancient human stories. But they're deeply entwined in our group psychology, so knowing how the dynamic works isn't sufficient to free us from the cycle. We have to collectively rise above. But, that's pretty hard so we haven't been able to do it yet.
There is no excuse for violence. There is always choice.
I think there are so, so many excuses for violence. If someone burst through my door looking to rob and victimize my family I would work pretty hard to do violence to them, and I think that's excusable. One doesn't have to think too hard to come up with other examples.
My theory here is that the people who would try and commit that crime against me are doing it for systemic reasons. Sure there are psychopaths or whatever, but broadly people are products of systems. We know this because people behave differently in different systems--if they didn't matter, we'd see similar aggregate behavior in all societies: crime rates, poverty rates, drug use, education rates, etc. Or to be more concrete: the US has more mass shootings than the EU because of its gun policies and culture, not because more people are randomly choosing to perpetrate mass shootings.
No. There are other ways.
For example, mobbing with massively superior numbers, resulting in no harm to anyone, and a suspect getting the hospital care they needed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mzPj_IaMzY
I’d never be a cop personally because, well, many reasons, frankly, but the biggest one is I have better options. And I’m sure you do too. Almost everyone does.
I’m not saying there doesn’t exist a way to nonviolently deal with the US criminal populace but I’ve yet to see any good examples of it outside of sound socioeconomic policies and a penal system that focuses on rehabilitation. And those are indirect.
I don't have a clear conclusion here to wrap it up, but the multiple dimensions at play here intuitively reject the assumption that you have to embrace the same characteristics that you are trying to protect against.
But it absolutely is about men maiming and killing one another with terrible weapons. The logistics are required to fuel the battle royale and the strategy is required to kill and maim more of the enemy more cheaply than they are maiming and killing your people.
Russia is doing the same through the Wagner group, but they've learned to just use the convicts as first-wave cannon fodder so they're minced before they can get rebellious.
This "band of rogues" stuff makes for fun television but falls short in practice. Hence this article.
Yes, and this is so obvious I can’t believe you are being downvoted. If authorities do nothing, vigilantism will become the increasingly common response. This is exactly what happened in the Seattle CHOP zone- no police = adhoc armed groups claiming that authority for themselves.
Diffusion of responsibility [1].
> But … no one cares?
It may very well be possible that the pig gangs (hard to call them cops) have kompromat - basically, shit like knowledge of extramarital affairs, illegitimate children, sex with prostitutes, fetishes, CSAM - on those in power or close to them. Let's be real: the amount of politicians caught unable to control their sexual urges is insane [2], and that's just the federal list.
For local/regional politicians, there's something else possible as well... fear of retaliation. Pigs can and do regularly get away with outright murder - the only thing that stopped the George Floyd case from being swept under the rug was a video.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_political_sex_...
And it's a feature not a bug.
The government doesn't want concentrated responsibility because that concentrates accountability. Concentrated accountability reduces the power to screw people as much/often because if responsibility is concentrated then the task of holding people accountable is much more tractable.
One bad man can be removed from power with one election, one prosecution and jail sentence, one bullet. You can't get rid of an entire misbehaving department so easily.
Having ineffective governing bodies and government departments that harbor abuse and do their jobs sloppily is just part of the tradeoff.
edit: the obvious answer is there are few to none.
[0]: https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a23080/spacex...
People are doing something and have made sure they can do more things.
https://abc7.com/la-county-sheriff-robert-luna-alex-villanue...
https://ballotpedia.org/Los_Angeles_County,_Measure_A,_Remov...
yes, you are reading this correctly, that Los Angeles County, starting in 2023 just received the power to do anything to Los Angeles Sheriff department
Villaneuva and the internal gangs were that unconscionable.
(Perhaps initially, as it went from mostly clean to compromised, there was bystander effect plus other effects)
An individual would be suicidal to join the LA Sheriff's force and try to solve it from within.
US military force needs to take control of the department, restructure the command, flush the compromised, and monitor as control is transferred back. That is what we would do if the force were compromised by a foreign force, and the same logic applies.
This is martial law. Los Angeles doesn't need martial law. What you're describing is the DoJ's job.
DoJ aren’t cops. (FBI are cops.)
The appropriate response would be for the county or state government to request assistance from the California Highway Patrol and/or Department of Justice.
They're shouted down for being "pro-crime" and "anti-cop".
I know this may be new to you (Welcome. We have a snacks.), but the least you could do is become a bit informed about this before spouting off.
It just seems like garden variety indifference/apathy/complacency...
Could be that these "gang members" are protected state or government actors ( cia, fbi, informants, etc ). Usually when government, media, etc ignores criminals or crimes, it's because of diplomatic or state reasons.
The people who have all of the money don't give a shit. They have enough money to drown out the plebs rattling our cages.
As long as they crack the right heads, suppress any movement looking to challenge power, and enforce the laws they deem important the police can act with impunity.
Pretty much everyone knows that the LA Sheriff's Department has been heavily infiltrated by gangs like the Compton Executioners. The phenomenon is extensively well-documented in the press and it even has a Wikipedia entry.
But … no one cares?
The federal government's Department of Justice just ignores it? ( https://raskin.house.gov/2022/2/chairman-raskin-rep-gomez-ur... )
At the state and county level, people just kind of ignore it?
And individuals can't do much about it, since after all the state has a monopoly on violence?
I mentioned the deputy gangs to a family member a while back and they were baffled that nobody is doing anything about it. But who would?
What is the word for "assuming someone else is going to do something about that, but there is no one"?