Fuck the Police State

[Stavros]

Why is someone be taken in to police custody for "sagging pants". Granted, it was illegal in that community, but that seems like an offense that should be covered by issuing a citation, not an arrest-able offence. I think the man probably had some mental health, and substance issues, but did he deserve to die? By the way, Whites were sagging long before Blacks. It was white blue collar workers, who were associated with 'having their burr cracks showing. For example, some had tool belts etc. I remember one tv episode of "Designing Women" in the early ninties, I guess, that had a long comedy segment about this. At the end a White plumber came in And when he went under the sink, you saw his crack, and the show ended, with a big laugh. 2013 a community makes it a crime, when Black youth are doing it. And in this story, a Black man is killed by the police in custody. But that's because it's no longer funny, huh?

In the UK we have called it 'builder's arse' or 'builder's bum' for decades or more but I think in more general terms with 'sagging pants' and also the baseball cap turned backwards or to the side, you are looking at how something that originates in one place -say, urban gangs or prison- migrates through other social groups until it becomes a bland fashion statement.
I know nothing about baseball but have read somewhere that an American player who needed to put on a face mask had to turn his cap backwards to fit it on; in other cases it became a part of gang uniform -presumably Black, then Latino then white?- until it just became a fashion statement, possibly gang members then just turned the cap sideways to be different. There is another theory that a backwards cap is a signal that the wearer is ready to give oral sex, particularly among lesbians (?).

There was a case in Arizona where a student was taken into custody for not wearing his cap according to the rules:
...a black student named Marlon Morgan wearing a sideways baseball cap was arrested during his lunch period. Marlon attended Saguaro High School in Scottsdale, Arizona, which has a policy against hats turned sideways. The policy cites this manner of hat-wearing as 'disrespectful'. He was asked to turn it forward facing. Marlon refused, pointing to other white students around him who were doing the same thing. He was asked to go to the office, which he didn't. The police were called, he still refused to turn his hat around. By then he was drawing a crowd, so the decision was made to take him into custody to prevent... well, the article doesn't exactly say. A scene, probably. He was held for several hours and then released, and no charges against him were made. http://web.morons.org/article.jsp?id=4712
(note- this website is now redundant).

The sagging pants is probably much older than the other theory which is that it comes out of prisons where inmates are not allowed to wear belts, thus it is a sign that someone is 'hip' or 'cool' because they have done time, which might be important in gangs -again this seems to migrate backwards and forwards through Black, White, Latino and gangs until it becomes a fashion statement, much as Rap began as the expression of urban Black rage/resentment and power and eventually morphed/collapsed into the bland mainstream, even if it remains unintelligible to men of my age and cultural disposition.

I guess a policeman seeing someone with sagging pants and a backwards cap is thinking -if he wants to be a gangster, I'll treat him like one...

[trish]

Apparently dreamon loves civil asset forfeiture and thinks it should be used by law enforcement agencies and courts to fund themselves. That way he gets to pay less taxes. The only drawback is a militarized police force prepared to confiscate money and property on trumped up charges and judges who will support them. We do not live in a federal police state (or a quasi police state): our troubles are the result of narrow minded state and local leaders, racism and poor social & fiscal policies on the level of state and local governments.

[yodajazz]

Thanks for your response Starvos. However, focus was really more about, why is such a behavior as sagging, such an offense that a person could be taken into police custody because of it? And in this case, the man died while in custody. Black Americans are probably the most incarcerated population on planet Earth. I have seen statistics that say a Black male teen has a 1 in 4 chance of spending time in prison, in the US. And then throw in the concept of private 'for profit' prisons, who sometimes have a guaranteed occupancy rates, in the contracts with the states. Here in my city this year, a policeman shot and killed a 12 year old who was playing with a 'toy' gun, ( an air pistol). Late last year in my state of Ohio, a Black man was killed in Walmart, carrying an air rifle that he got off the shelf in the store. The man was about 21, and had two small children. I had a first cousin that died in police custody, but that was in the eighties. They claimed that he hung himself. But he was only in for a DUI and was the father of two young children. The US dept of Justice wrote a whole report on police dept here. My favorite incident in the report was about a man, who was 'accidentally' shot in the chest, by a policeman for attempting to make a right turn from the center lane, downtown. Why would a police even be drawing his pistol for such a minor offense? Such behavior had the potential of harming bystanders, since the reason the car could not complete the turn, because the cross walk was crowded with pedestrians. How about when the police here, pumped 127 bullets killing two, unarmed people. The did run from police. However the reason the police came after them, has been reported to have probably been a car engine backfire. Lastly, you're from England, I believe. I recently read a online report that claimed that more Americans were killed by the police in March, than in England for 100 years. I don't know if this is true or not. It said that only 12-13 people had been killed by the police there in that 100 year time frame. I wouldn't run from the police, but lots of people are deathly scared. The man in the attached article, went with the police, and died in their custody.

[broncofan]

There are reasons to be afraid of police officers, particularly if you are African-American. However, I don't see how any objective person could ever believe they would be safer by running from a police officer. What is an officer supposed to do when they are questioning someone and they bolt? Not give chase? If a person runs, it means at the very least they will be in a confrontation with an armed officer.

Your last two sentences make it sound as though African-Americans are faced with a dilemma where they think they will be safer fleeing from any officer than complying with lawful requests. I can't for the life of me see that. I think in terms of pure risk creation (not justification), anything that escalates a situation with someone who is armed is dangerous.

None of that is an excuse for police violence. If a police officer uses an unlawful amount of force he or she should obviously be prosecuted.

[Stavros]

Thanks for your response Starvos. However, focus was really more about, why is such a behavior as sagging, such an offense that a person could be taken into police custody because of it? And in this case, the man died while in custody. Black Americans are probably the most incarcerated population on planet Earth. I have seen statistics that say a Black male teen has a 1 in 4 chance of spending time in prison, in the US. And then throw in the concept of private 'for profit' prisons, who sometimes have a guaranteed occupancy rates, in the contracts with the states. Here in my city this year, a policeman shot and killed a 12 year old who was playing with a 'toy' gun, ( an air pistol). Late last year in my state of Ohio, a Black man was killed in Walmart, carrying an air rifle that he got off the shelf in the store. The man was about 21, and had two small children. I had a first cousin that died in police custody, but that was in the eighties. They claimed that he hung himself. But he was only in for a DUI and was the father of two young children. The US dept of Justice wrote a whole report on police dept here. My favorite incident in the report was about a man, who was 'accidentally' shot in the chest, by a policeman for attempting to make a right turn from the center lane, downtown. Why would a police even be drawing his pistol for such a minor offense? Such behavior had the potential of harming bystanders, since the reason the car could not complete the turn, because the cross walk was crowded with pedestrians. How about when the police here, pumped 127 bullets killing two, unarmed people. The did run from police. However the reason the police came after them, has been reported to have probably been a car engine backfire. Lastly, you're from England, I believe. I recently read a online report that claimed that more Americans were killed by the police in March, than in England for 100 years. I don't know if this is true or not. It said that only 12-13 people had been killed by the police there in that 100 year time frame. I wouldn't run from the police, but lots of people are deathly scared. The man in the attached article, went with the police, and died in their custody.

Yodajazz thanks for your response and I do appreciate the difference between arresting someone for sagging pants and shooting dead someone in the various cases you referred to. As I pointed out in an earlier post, there are proportionately more Black people in prison in the UK than there are in the US, and the statistics reveal, as stated in the link "More than 500 black and ethnic minority individuals have died in suspicious circumstances while in state detention over the past 24 years, but not a single official has been successfully prosecuted, a report examining institutional racism has revealed."
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2...o-prosecutions

In the UK some of these victims were being 'cared for' not by the police or the prison service but by private security firms under contract to the police or the prison system. If most of these cases do not get the same attention as their counterparts in the US, even in the British media, this may because it is preferable to look at someone else's problems rather than our own. Moreover, when it does become an issue in the media it is almost always in regard to someone who is involved in crime and therefore in some way 'responsible' for their own death or at least unlikely to get much public sympathy, as happened with the murder of a man called Mark Duggan who was shot dead by the police in 2011, and whose death sparked riots in British cities unprecedented since the riots of 1981. On the radio a week or so ago a Black man was complaining of the fact that he had been stopped and searched by the police 87 times last year. I have never been stopped or searched by the police in my entire life. It is called discrimination, and it is as real here as it is in the USA.
There are of course wider issues which relate to the devastating loss of jobs in the industrial sectors in both the UK and the US which has had an abnormal impact on low-or-non skilled workers, not least when running drugs is the only alternative source of income, as is true of some but I assume not all young people in West Baltimore. But as your post says, there is the grotesque fact that if it wasn't for the abnormally high volume of Black prisoners in privately run prisons they would go out of business -and I daresay many of their prison guards are also Black and would lose their jobs. Nevertheless, Atlanta used to have one of the highest rates of crime in the US whereas now for a city with more than 200,000 its crime rate is lower than Salt Lake City. Washington DC had a crime epidemic in the 1990s related directly to the crack epidemic, and while a lot of it was deal with by extreme prison sentencing (sentencing in the US is significantly more extreme than in Europe), the decline of crack use and a different attitude to drugs by young people who saw their parents generation destroyed has made a difference, so that it is possible for situations to change for the better.
A lot depends on how America treats its minorities, an issue that is just as relevant in the UK and for which there are no easy solutions. But maybe the police in the US should be just a bit more tolerant of misdemeanors? And let's face it, if a thirty-year old policeman can't run after and apprehend an unarmed 50 year old suspect, maybe he should spend time in the gym.

[yodajazz]

28 year old woman, arrested after a stop for failing to use turn signal, commits suicide in jail(?). My research found a police spokesperson claims she kicked a policeman after being stopped.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/l...ry.html#page=1

[Stavros]

I hesitate to use the words 'Once again..' in the case of Sandra Bland, but as I said in the earlier post "maybe the police in the US should be just a bit more tolerant of misdemeanors?" -changing lanes without indicating may be worthy of a caution, I just don't understand how it could not just escalate at the scene, but lead to incarceration and result in what seems to me to have been a complete breakdown by a woman who must have been so terribly alone and scared, as if in the space of a few hours her entire world had fallen apart -for what? On the one hand it may never be a good idea to 'talk back' to a policeman, in any country, but there are times when one wonders if citizens have to give up some of their legal rights to bow and scrape before a policeman or a 'state trooper' (whatever that is), just to avoid having the rest of their rights -such as the right to life- completely discarded.

Or it could just be a simple case: Sandra Bland was Black. End of story. It just ain't right.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/...-10418370.html

[flabbybody]

"bow and scrape before a policeman" ?? That's certainly not what was being asked of her.
Sandra Bland would be nothing more than a traffic statistic had she simply complied with instructions in a respectful manner....as we are all obligated to do while operating a motor vehicle during a routine encounter with a police officer.
It's not a perfect world Stavros, cops have bad days. no doubt this a tragic death of an innocent person, but at the end of the day Ms Bland taking a tiny different course of action would have resulted in her driving away with a warning or summons.... annoyed but alive.

[buttslinger]

Rookie cop pulling over CRIMINAL LANE CHANGERS is a joke, but so is all these family and friends of Sandra Bland CASHING IN on her death when they couldn't even scrape up 500 bucks to bail her out of jail.

I got a DRIVING WHILE INTOXICATED arrest once, and while the cops were transferring me to another precinct near my house, I shared a ride with some black kid on his eighteenth birthday whose own parents called the cops to literally drag him out of their house. When we got to the station the cop let me walk, but he picked up the little black kid and SLAMMED him up against the brick wall......
"We're not going to have anymore trouble from you, are we?"

It's not a fluke that half of the country is Republican, the FAMILY UNIT in the USA ain't what it used to be. Problem children become problem adults.

My Grandfather was practically a Plantation owner in the 1930s deep south and wasn't afraid of anything or anyone except for the Black Nanny that raised him. She had his number.

[Stavros]

"bow and scrape before a policeman" ?? That's certainly not what was being asked of her.
Sandra Bland would be nothing more than a traffic statistic had she simply complied with instructions in a respectful manner....as we are all obligated to do while operating a motor vehicle during a routine encounter with a police officer.
It's not a perfect world Stavros, cops have bad days. no doubt this a tragic death of an innocent person, but at the end of the day Ms Bland taking a tiny different course of action would have resulted in her driving away with a warning or summons.... annoyed but alive.

I understand the point you are making, giving lip to a policeman in this country is also not advisable.
On the other hand, policemen or state troopers ought to be able to take much worse than Sandra Bland gave them without losing their cool, they are the professionals in this situation -are they not trained to deal with hostile suspects? The issue is the law, not the person, but I suspect that on both sides of the pond this gets lost in the heat of the moment. The danger is that one ends up blaming the victim rather than the system which dealt severely with her disobedience, but then abandoned her in her cell when she was at her most vulnerable. She could at least have been put in a cell with someone else to talk to.