Posted on
September 1, 2011 in
When Chicago criminal-defense lawyer Marcus Schantz got a not guilty from a jury last week for a guy accused of assaulting a couple of cops, I was pleased for him. It looked like a bad case; and any time we put the government to its proof and the jury agrees with us, it’s worth an attaboy or two.
Not everybody agrees.
Schantz, via Twitter, pointed out this post and its comments, on the Detective Shaved Longcock (yeah, really) cop blog.
Sample anonymous comments:
Dude is beyond redemption. I summon by the blood of Jesus the spirit of George Lincoln Rockwell. We got business to attend to. Time to clean out the roaches.
(George Lincoln Rockwell was the founder of the American Nazi Party.)
It would be terrible if this nigger were to be found in an alley with his throat cut.
and
Whats this niggers address?
I suddenly have the urge to burn a cross…
Then another post, same blog. More overtly racist comments from anonymous commenters. For example:
you wanna see my membership card in the Indiana Klan motherfucker?
I was a legacy accept from the Greenwood Mississippi chapter.White.
Racist.
Klan
Proud.Fuck you nigger.
(He may be white, racist, and Klan, but he couldn’t be very proud, since he’s commenting anonymously. Internet anonymity is the equivalent of the Klansman’s hood: it gives racists a chance to express themselves without their neighbors finding out.)
Cops. Maybe some pretenders and wannabes too, but it’s a cop blog, with cop readers and cop commenters.
That many cops are overt racists is no surprise; the phenomenon isn’t limited to Chicago. Many people are racists; pinning on a badge and strapping on a gun does nothing to reduce racism; to the contrary, when your chief contact with people of another race is having to arrest them for breaking the law, your racism might well be aggravated.
The cops involved got on the witness stand and testified; Marcus’s client got on the witness stand and testified. It didn’t take the jury long to find him not guilty. Why did the jury not believe the cops beyond a reasonable doubt? Who can say? But…
Imagine that jurors follow cop blogs and their comments. They have reasonably concluded that there is a strong undercurrent of racism among white cops in the Chicago Police Department, with some white cops willing to publicly advocate crossburning and murder of blacks. What would stop such cops from perjuring themselves to put in prison a black man who shot at them? How can the jurors tell the difference between the police officer who is willing to lie to them, and the police officer who isn’t? In a police department infected with Nazis and Klansmen, any cop might be a Nazi or a Klansman, intent on doing whatever can be done to put blacks in their place. Isn’t it a real possibility that in this case the cops are lying to put the defendant where they think he belongs?
If it’s a real possibility that the cops are lying about a material fact, isn’t that a reasonable doubt? If cops who may be lying say that they clearly announced their presence before the defendant started shooting at them and the defendant who may be lying says that isn’t true, has anything been proven beyond a reasonable doubt? If the state hasn’t proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant knew the cops were cops, doesn’t the defendant walk?
Cops want everyone else to think as highly of them as they think of themselves; when people fail to show proper adulation for them, the cops take it personally (I got pulled over once for going 63 in a 60 zone on a road built for 150 because I dared creep past a cop who was impeding traffic at 60). Getting less respect from a jury than they deserve can be upsetting to police officers.
Do Chicago’s finest think that by lashing out against blacks they make it more likely that the next jury will show them more love?
Any thoughts on the 3 gb leak of Texas police e-mail as it relates to this subject? There’s some pretty shocking quotes in the story on Gizmodo.
I hadn’t seen the story till you pointed it out to me. I will take a look at the data dump.
Aye, “contempt of cop” is one of those vicious positive feedback loops now it seems. The more contemptibly they behave, the more contempt we heap upon them, the more their extremely fragile egos require massaging…usually with the aid of quasi-sexual electrical torture devices or the old phallic stand-in, their pistol.
I had a similar experience on Beltway 8 a while back. The cop was in a Harris County Sheriff’s crime-scene truck, driving just below the 65 limit on the right at night. I crept to what I thought was a safe distance ahead then stepped back up to my usual 85 or so. He pulled me over and had an apoplectic fit; when he’d stopped frothing enough to be intelligible, he asked me “don’t you have any RESPECT?” No mention of the speed; that was immaterial, what mattered was the lack of “respect”.
I had to assume an honest answer would involve an inconvenient kidnapping, so I remained silent.
Ya’know what’s going to be so much fun in the coming years?
Yup. Troops returning from fightin’ fer our freedoms, flooding into the LEO* ranks. Yes sir, a healthy dose of “young, dumb, and full of cum” spiced liberally with PTSD and a lovely marinade of psychotropic drugs keeping them just this side of raving lunacy…maybe throw in some steroids, which I understand are all the rage in PD’s across the land.
Oh boy.
Statistically you’re eight times more likely to be killed by a cop than a terrorist over the last ten years.
Uh-oh. Someone called me on the “8x more likely to be killed by a cop than a terrorist over the last decade”, so I re-researched it.
The original article I quoted was incorrect. As near as I can tell, strict deaths by cop shooting average about 400 per year over the last ten years.
SO: I retract the “8x more likely”. You are merely MORE likely to die by cop than by terrorist, by a margin of about 4:3.
That doesn’t include the roughly 400 deaths-by-taser in the last ten years, although that figure is probably grossly underestimated as Taser Intl. exerts massive pressure to keep deaths off Taser’s roll. The deaths are usually blamed on concomitant factors like intoxication or pre-existing conditions.
Sorry to have blindly quoted an article without verifying for myself. It’s the first mistake I’ve made this year and statistically probably the last
:)
P.S. The asterisk after LEO I never attributed: Since when did cops start calling themselves by the macho ‘Law Enforcement Officer’ and stop referring to themselves as “peace officers”? The militarization and federalization of the police should scare the hell out of anyone who’s read even the Dummies’ Guide to History.
Come Monday, when 9/11/01 is more than ten years behind us, it will be true that at least eight times as many American civilians will have been killed by police officers than by terrorists in the last decade.
Year Killed
1998 12
1999 6
2000 23
2001 2689
2002 27
2003 35
2004 ?
2005 ?
2006 56
2007 19
2008 33
2009 9
2010 15
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