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AMERICAN COPS: “Officer Friendly” to “Mad Max”

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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« on: December 12, 2015, 12:12:08 pm »

from The Washington Post....

How the police duty belt went from Officer Friendly
to Mad Max in 30 short years


By ASHLEY BALCERZAK | 1:59PM EST - Friday, December 11, 2015



THE MODERN ERA of police firepower dawned on February 28th, 1997, when 200 Los Angeles police officers armed with pistols and shotguns struggled to slow down two bank robbers carrying fully automatic rifles and wearing 40 pounds of body armor. Outgunned, several officers ran to local gun stores to borrow semiautomatic AR-15s, which they used to bring the gunmen down.

After the Battle of North Hollywood, police across the nation vowed never to be overpowered again. And so they jettisoned the 9 mm pistols, .38 Special revolvers and 12-gauge shotguns that were standard issue at the time, and began replacing them with semiautomatic handguns and the trusty AR-15.

The moment was part of a wider trend: the steady accumulation of new, more accurate and more deadly tools on the U.S. police officer’s duty belt and in his patrol car. So far this year, police nationwide have shot and killed more than 900 people, according to a Washington Post database tracking such shootings. As the nation debates the propriety of those encounters, law enforcement experts say the modern police duty belt may play a significant role in an officer’s decision to use deadly force.

“The more crap you put on your belt, the more apt you are to use it,” said Mark Lomax, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association.

Not that police didn't have good reason to load up their belts. The ultra-violent crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s led police to fear for their safety, as did the increasing number of criminals who showed up for work armed with military-grade weapons.

“The transition of weaponry in law enforcement over the last 30 and 40 years is the direct result of what the civilian world was carrying,” Lomax said.

So the duty belt evolved. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was a leather belt with maybe five attachments, according to Jim Bueermann, president of the Police Foundation: a Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolver, ammunition pouches, Mace spray, a nightstick and handcuffs. Today, Lomax said, there's usually a metal baton, pepper spray, a Taser and a semiautomatic pistol with ammunition.

Here's a primer on the evolution:


The gun…

Police began shifting to semiautomatic handguns in the late 1980s. The handguns replaced revolvers, which require shooters to manually load six bullets into the cylinder. Semiautomatic pistols reload automatically though — unlike fully automatic weapons — they fire just one shot with each trigger pull.

Departments feeling outgunned by gangsters and searching for a new weapon found the perfect solution in the Glock 17, an Austrian weapon manufactured by Gaston Glock, according to Paul M. Barrett, author of GLOCK: The Rise of America's Gun. When Glock peddled his cheap, easy-to-use pistol to stations across the United States, police officials were impressed.

Officers actually shot more accurately with the Glock because it only required 5.5 pounds of pressure on the trigger compared to 12 pounds for the Smith & Wesson revolver. But this feature had complicated consequences, Barrett said.

“If you graze the trigger, the gun will go off, which led to safety problems before people were properly trained,” Barrett said. “They couldn't have a finger on the trigger until they are actually able to shoot.”


Pepper spray…

Revolvers weren't the only weapons needing improvement. Police found tear gas sprays, such as Mace, had little effect on drunks or people high on drugs. So they traded Mace for pepper spray in the mid-1980s, after the FBI adopted the weapon. The active ingredient, found in cayenne peppers, temporarily blinds suspects, burns skin and causes difficulty breathing.

Tasers…

Some new additions to the duty belt were made to solve PR problems. Take the Taser. In the 1960s, news reports described police jabbing civil rights activists with the same three-foot-long electrical poles “usually used for forcing cattle into chutes.”

“They didn't like the optics of using tools meant for animals on people pushing for equal rights, so people started coming up with alternative means of delivering electricity,” said Adam Bates, of the Cato Institute's Project on Criminal Justice.

The first stun guns were marketed as a way to demobilize terrorists, particularly on airplanes, said Darius Rejali, a Reed College professor who studies electric weapons. Later, in the late 1990s, the Taser appeared on police belts after being declassified as a firearm.

Instead of pressing the weapon directly to the skin of an attacker, like a traditional stun gun, a Taser lets an officer fire a pair of electrodes, which remain connected to the weapon by wires, which then deliver the jolt. Tasers are now carried by more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies worldwide.


The baton…

The nightstick, too, suffered an image problem after Chicago police were photographed clubbing African Americans during the 1968 riots, said Massad F. Ayoob, the author of Fundamentals of Modern Police Impact Weapons.

The solution came in 1972 with the PR-24, a 24-inch side-handle baton modeled after a Japanese martial arts weapon.

Police grip the perpendicular handle and hold it like a shield across their chests in a defensive stance. While greatly improving police departments' image problems, the altered training had unintended consequences.

“The offense was very weak because you were swinging rather than striking,” said Dave Young, the founder of ARMA training, a Wisconsin law enforcement academy. “Sure, the public image was greatly improved, but you compromised officer safety.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on this topic:

 • Creating Guardians, Calming Warriors: A new style of police training emphasizes de-escalating conflict.

 • New recruits and a new weapon: How the arrival of the Glock 17 contributed to a surge of police shootings in the District.

 • Improper Techniques; Increased Risks: Deaths raise questions about the improper deployment of Tasers.

 • On Duty, Under Fire: How a Wisconsin state trooper faced down a gunman who planned to go out fighting.

 • Black and Unarmed: A year after Ferguson, unarmed black men are seven times more likely to die by police gunfire than unarmed whites.

 • SCOOP: FBI to sharply expand system for tracking fatal police shootings.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/12/11/how-the-police-duty-belt-went-from-officer-friendly-to-mad-max-in-30-short-years
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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #1 on: July 09, 2016, 02:45:31 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

As police shootings continue, bystanders get more
sophisticated at filming altercations


By MATT PEARCE, MOLLY HENNESSY-FISKE and ERICA EVANS | 4:13PM PDT - Thursday, July 07, 2016

Diamond Reynolds, the girlfriend of Philando Castile, cries outside the governor's residence in St. Paul, Minnesota. — Photograph: Jim Mone/Associated Press.
Diamond Reynolds, the girlfriend of Philando Castile, cries outside the governor's residence in St. Paul, Minnesota.
 — Photograph: Jim Mone/Associated Press.


THE gunshots had stopped by the time Diamond Reynolds started filming. Her boyfriend sat dying in the driver's seat of their car, his shirt drenched with blood. A police officer stood in the background, cursing, as he kept his gun trained on Philando Castile's slumping body.

Millions of viewers from around the world have now seen Reynolds' stunning livestream Facebook video, in which she calmly says that an officer had pulled the couple over for a broken tail light in a Minneapolis suburb on Wednesday — and then shot Castile, who was black, as he reached for his wallet.

It was the second high-profile police shooting of a black man in two days, and that audience of millions is exactly what Reynolds wanted — because she had no confidence that the police would properly investigate the shooting.

“I wanted everyone in the world to know that no matter how much the police tamper with evidence, how much they stick together … I wanted to put it on Facebook and go viral so that the people could see,” an emotional Reynolds told reporters on Thursday after news of her boyfriend's death circled the world.

“I did it so that the world knows that these police are not here to protect and serve us. They are here to assassinate us. They are here to kill us because we are black.”

Castile's shooting death and the shooting death of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, this week have reignited a familiar wave of protests and racial anxiety over police shootings, which continue to occur despite largely fading from national headlines since a series of high-profile cases in 2014 and 2015.

Investigators are looking into both cases and have not said whether they suspect the officers in either instance acted criminally, but both cases suggest that witnesses such as Reynolds have grown more sophisticated in documenting police use of force and intentionally bypassing investigators to bring their evidence to the public.

The public outcry over the video, viewed more than 4.2 million times, was accompanied by a public condemnation of the incident by Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton, who said racism appeared to be a factor. “Nobody should be shot and killed in Minnesota … for a tail-light being out of function,” the Democratic governor said. “Nobody should be shot and killed while seated still in their car. I'm heartbroken.”

Members of the Baton Rouge non-profit Stop the Killing filmed and released video of Sterling's shooting on Tuesday after police scanner traffic drew them to the scene, according to the group's founder, Arthur Reed.

Their video, which prompted street protests in Baton Rouge, shows two white police officers fatally shooting Sterling, 37, after apparently pinning him to the ground. Sterling had been selling CDs in front of a convenience store.

Reed said the group chose to release the video publicly instead of turning it over to the police because they saw it as evidence of misconduct that they didn't trust the department to investigate.

“We didn't want to just go to the cops and go, ‘It looks like the police was wrong’, and suddenly the file was corrupted,” Reed said of the video.

State officials called for the U.S. Department of Justice to handle the investigation. Reed said his group had not yet been contacted by any investigators.

“We're not interested in talking to them,” he said. “They have the video. That's all they need from us.”

The media obtained a second video on Wednesday that showed Sterling's fatal shooting. It was taken by the store's owner, Abdullah Muflahi, who also didn't trust police enough to hand over the video, said his attorney, Joel Porter.

In a tactic that could have been taken out of an investigators' playbook, Porter hinted that there was more evidence — but that he was holding it back so that he could use it to evaluate whether police were being truthful.

“I want them to be locked into a narrative,” he said. “They thought they could come in and confiscate and control what the narrative was. But now they know there's other footage out there.”

So important has citizen documentation become that the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups have created smartphone apps that allow onlookers to observe, record and report.

“In communities where men, women and children are profiled, arrested, beaten and even killed under suspicious circumstances and at alarming rates, citizens need to be able to create an accurate record of their interactions with police,” Darrell Dawsey, spokeman for the ACLU of Michigan, wrote when that state's “Mobile Justice MI” app was released in June 2015.

In many cases, the officer-involved shootings that gain public attention are those documented in a video.

That was the case in Fresno this week with news that police had shot a 19-year-old man on June 25th. The case had already sparked protests when cellphone video shot by an unidentified witness and obtained by the Fresno Bee brought even more public scrutiny to the case. It shows Dylan Noble lying on the ground as two officers with their guns drawn stand feet away from him.

As officers yell, “Keep your hands up,” and other commands, one shot is fired. Seconds later, a third officer approaches, and another shot rings out. At one point Noble can be seen raising his arm and saying, “I've been shot.”

Video emerged in a similar fashion in North Charleston, South Carolina, in early 2015 when police officer Michael Slager shot and killed a black man, Walter Scott.

A bystander, Feidin Santana, shot video of Slager shooting Scott as Scott ran away, and then left the scene without releasing the video to police because he was afraid, his attorney said.

But when investigators gave a different version of the circumstances of the shooting to the local media, Santana said: “I gotta do this, I gotta release this, or they're going to get away with murder,” according to his attorney, Todd Rutherford. The video quickly became national news and Slager was charged with murder and indicted on federal charges.

The fact that amateurs have embraced some of the tactics used by activist groups who monitor the police has made some activists nervous.

Jacob Crawford is an Oakland-based founding member of WeCopWatch, which monitors police encounters with the public. On multiple occasions, he said, he has been afraid for his life.

Activists at CopWatch-type groups around the country sometimes get in shouting matches with the police and also get arrested.

“As they have become bolder and more confrontational, group members have increasingly encroached upon officers at scenes of law enforcement activity,” Deputy Police Chief Leland Strickland in Arlington, Texas, wrote in a department memo in 2014.

Crawford said problems can arise as more with people attempt to film police stops alone and without proper training.

“I get so worried because I want everybody to be safe and make it away with the best outcome,” he said.

Joaquin Cienfuegos, an organizer at  Cop Watch LA, explained some of the safety precautions that his organization recommends: Observers should go out in groups, stand within a reasonable distance and be careful not to interfere with the police investigation.

Livestream capability has become a new tool for CopWatch members because it allows them to share incidents before police have a chance to confiscate phones or build an official narrative about what happened, Cienfuegos said.

In the recent case in Minnesota, Cienfuegos said, “If she wasn't livestreaming that, none of this [strong public response] would've happened.”


• Pearce and Evans reported from Los Angeles and Hennessy-Fiske reported from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related stories:

 • Names are released of officers involved in shooting that Minnesota governor calls an example of racism

 • Obama on deadly police shootings of black men: ‘We can do better’

 • Minnesota woman who streamed video of dying boyfriend decries police who shot him

 • Justice Department to investigate Alton Sterling's killing by police in Louisiana


http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-video-shooting-20160707-snap-story.html
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« Reply #2 on: July 11, 2016, 11:12:07 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Face it, Facebook. You’re in the news business.

By MARGARET SULLIVAN | 4:45PM EDT - Sunday, July 10, 2016

An editor watches the live-streamed video that captured the aftermath of the police shooting of Philando Castile. — Photograph: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.
An editor watches the live-streamed video that captured the aftermath of the police shooting of Philando Castile.
 — Photograph: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.


YOU'VE heard of the accidental tourist. Now we have the reluctant news media.

I'm talking about Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, among others. With the advent of live-streaming options — Facebook Live and Periscope, primarily — their already huge influence in the news universe has taken another stunning leap.

When Diamond Reynolds logged on to Facebook after her boyfriend, Philando Castile, was shot by a police officer Wednesday in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, her first words as she started recording were “Stay with me.” Millions did.

On the strength of that live video, Minnesota's governor brought in the Justice Department to investigate what might otherwise have gone unquestioned as a justified police action.

I call that news.

But Facebook doesn't see itself that way, even though two-thirds of its 1.6 billion users get news there — and even though they all now can be citizen journalists with live-broadcast cameras in their pockets.

In a recent blog post, Facebook executive Adam Mosseri reiterated Facebook's consistent position: “We are not in the business of picking which issues the world should read about. We are in the business of connecting people and ideas — and matching people with the stories they find most meaningful.”

Still, crucial decisions are constantly thrust upon Facebook. And they aren't too different from those that news editors have always made: Should the newspaper print a photo of an assassinated ambassador? Should a TV network air a terrorist beheading?

Some social-media equivalents: Twitter decided to suspend 125,000 accounts that were associated with recruiting terrorists. YouTube chose to take down, and then put back up, video of Syrian security forces torturing a teenage boy. Reynolds's video was removed from Facebook for about an hour after it was posted and then restored.

“There's clearly an editorial process in which Silicon Valley companies are deciding what to put back up,” often in response to protests from viewers, said Zeynep Tufekci of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. This sometimes happens after users have flagged an item as offensive, resulting in its being removed in the first place. She thinks that is what happened with Reynolds's video. Facebook has called it a technical glitch.

And, Tufekci told me, human involvement is always necessary: “The world's best robot can't do it.” (Adrian Chen wrote in Wired about “moderation warehouses”, where thousands of low-paid workers worldwide make these determinations, as they view the worst of human nature.)

Facebook and others undoubtedly are struggling with what their outsize power has wrought. That can't be easy, as events keep coming ever faster.

It was a big deal last month when Twitter's Periscope provided live coverage of a congressional sit-in over gun control after C-SPAN cameras were turned off. And only one day after Reynolds's video rocked the world, Facebook Live captured the scene in Dallas, where a sniper had mowed down police officers.

When Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Facebook Live globally early this year, he spoke (by live video, of course) about its potential. Curiously, he used the word “raw” — and spoke about the opportunity to observe baby bald eagles or a friend's haircut.

Far more raw, though, was the 10-minute live stream following Castile's shooting, with the sound of a policeman's screamed profanity, the clink of handcuffs, the victim's blood-drenched shirt, and the surreally moving words of a 4-year-old girl comforting her mother: “It's okay, I'm right here with you.”

These tools, no doubt, can bring great good. They certainly bring great challenges, too, including (as CNN's Hope King wrote recently) trying to stop criminals and terrorists from live-streaming their deeds.

What's more, they increasingly put social media companies in a position that traditional news companies have long resisted — becoming an arm of law enforcement in criminal investigations. The traditional press sees itself as a counterweight to government, as the founders intended; social media platforms aren't having any of that.

Facebook has for years complied with subpoenas, giving courts or law enforcement detailed information about its users — their friends, locations and posts. The company makes no secret of that.

And so, while Facebook may seem to be mostly about your cousin's Cape Cod vacation, and Twitter may seem to be mostly about where journalists dined in Perugia, there are far bigger issues afoot. It's not exaggerating to say that, among them, are civil liberties and free speech.

Facebook spokeswoman Christine Chen pointed me on Friday to the company's published “community standards”, and assured me that serious discussions have taken place ever since Facebook Live's launch: “We're being thoughtful about this.” She wouldn't talk about the “technical glitch” that Facebook cited after taking down and restoring Reynolds's video.

Yes, social media platforms are businesses. They have no obligation to call their offerings “news” or to depict their judgments as editorial decisions. They are free to describe their missions as providing a global town square or creating a more connected globe.

But given their extraordinary influence, they do have an obligation to grapple, as transparently as possible, with extraordinary responsibility.


• Margaret Sullivan is The Washington Post's media columnist. Previously, she was The New York Times public editor, and the chief editor of The Buffalo News, her hometown paper.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/face-it-facebook-youre-in-the-news-business/2016/07/10/cc53cd70-451a-11e6-bc99-7d269f8719b1_story.html
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