I have a potentially silly question, and obviously naive - but why so many drawn guns? Fun music videos aside, what was the background here? Were they coming in on a Massive gang fortress? Or are all the stereotypes of American police forces true and they just come guns a-blazing all the time? I mean, that wasn't even police officers with hand guns, they have army-like guys with massive automatic rifles, and they seem to keep them drawn and hair triggered throughout the search? :O
(on aside, I do enjoy watching British crime procedural shows as contrast, where seemingly nobody has guns and they have to call in a special unit if they actually need somebody with a handgun)
I mean the key point there I think is the one where they point out that Brits simply wouldn’t accept police regularly shooting people. Policing for the people by the people.*
* and pretend Northern Ireland doesn’t exist, or course
PSNI had one single firearm discharge in the two year period covering October 2023 - September 2025.
Plus 948 uses of irritant spray, 496 uses of their baton, and 38 taser discharges in the same period. And 23,489 uses of "unarmed physical tactics".
That's for a population of around 2 million. By comparison, SFPD had 10 "officer involved shootings" in the past year for a population of 800k, a rate fifty times higher than that in NI.
Yeah, it was very different back then. And not just the police - we had the army on the streets with weapons drawn, routinely aiming at passersby.
The political situation in the late 1960s provided plenty of kindling, but it seems clear that most of the sparks that actually caused the conflagration came from the barrel of guns held by soldiers and the police. They were directly responsible both for the death of the civil rights movement and the collapse of the government, and without the heavy-handed response it's likely that the settlement of the late 90s would've happened 25 years earlier.
It's actually a great example of why the militarisation of policing should be resisted at all cost.
In Britain, there is independent civilian investigation when cops kill a person. It creates pressure to not kill, because you wont be judged by buddies.
So are we all just oblivious to the fact that in the US, civilians practically have access to military gear? How can you police that type of population with sticks and stones?
I can see the argument how you would treat a suspect with a gun differently than you would if they have a knife.
However, American cops also use guns against suspects with knives or other weapons that they also use in places like Scotland. Why couldn’t American police use these techniques when the suspect doesn’t have a gun?
I know the standard response is, “well, they COULD have a gun!”, but I don’t think that is a good enough reason to always go straight to extreme response. If a suspect is brandishing a knife, he probably doesn’t also have a gun.
As a fun example I had a coworker who collected handguns. I once asked him how many he had and he asked for clarification, should he include unregistered?
Personally I’ve had encounters with LE and have not had a gun drawn yet, so it’s obviously not the default. But I disagree, I think brandishing a knife is already extreme behavior, I don’t think it’s logical to think “because he has a weapon he probably doesn’t have another!”. And why would someone threatening people with a knife deserve benefit of the doubt?
> Personally I’ve had encounters with LE and have not had a gun drawn yet, so it’s obviously not the default.
What does the default have to do with it? We are already not in the default situation. Interacting with police at all is not the default! If you mean to say something like "it's not likely" or "they're not doing it in unreasonable cases" then your anecdote is not relevant.
> And why would someone threatening people with a knife deserve benefit of the doubt?
Several reasons, which would be obvious if you tried to think of them. Most knife-wielding maniacs are, well, maniacs, and aren't fully in control of their actions. Innocent bystanders are regularly killed by police discharging guns accidentally or inappropriately (in fact, even police are frequently killed this way). People are routinely misidentified by police as carrying weapons when they aren't. Police often give misleading or unclear instructions while trying to de-escalate, and with a gun drawn, failure to comply can and does result in the suspect being shot.
Bear in mind that what you are excusing is essentially a (substantially increased likelihood of) extrajudicial execution. It should be a last resort. It's not enough to say "well he's clearly a bad guy, why give him the benefit of the doubt?".
Let's aim for a max of once every year, then, over the entire USA. And once that's achieved, let's aim for once every few years. Once a decade should be good enough, you probably won't get better than that.
The EU has a much bigger population than the USA, in a smaller space, and I'd bet they're already around this number.
Well... the sicilian mafia comes to mind... the french can be quite violent too... Western Europe is not so bad either, with guns.
I guess you mean "normal" non-criminal people in the EU are not allowed to have AR-15 assault rifles in their homes, that they can use if they have mental health issues.
I personally believe that is one of the reasons the USA has so much gun violence. Get rid of the guns in people's homes and things will change.
Why is it not zero? This strikes me as the exact sort of calculus they used way back when they stopped chasing fleeing suspects in vehicles: the danger to the public is too high to justify the use of force. If you can't hit your suspect without hitting other civilians, then don't fucking fire! And no I don't particularly care if the LEO's life might be in danger either, that's literally the job they signed up for: to put themselves in danger to enforce the law. It's ridiculous that cops just get complete power of life and death every time they feel a spot of stress, and have to be handled with kid gloves by the general public less they be murdered in the streets.
I will never be zero because perfection is impossible. It's like saying there should be zero car fatalities. We should work to get them down (enforcement against drunk driving, maybe checkpoints, stronger driving tests), but asking for zero accidents just isn't reality.
"Helsinki hasn’t registered a single traffic-related fatality in the past year, municipal officials revealed this week."
"The limits were enforced with 70 new speed cameras and a policing strategy based on the national “Vision Zero” policy, with the goal of achieving zero traffic injuries or deaths. Data collected by Liikenneturva, Finland’s traffic safety entity, shows Helsinki’s traffic fatalities have been declining ever since."
That's not analogous at all. Everyone drives, and so everyone is a possible source of a car crash. Police are not (in theory) just whoever wanders into the goddamn precinct. They're (in theory) trained professionals, educated in what they do, and therefore entrusted with both the force of law, and the deadly force they wear on their belts.
And no we probably can't make it ZERO, but we could surely get it under 1,300!?
1300 is not the rate of innocent bystanders being killed. It's the rate of people killed by police period. Maybe if we didn't have police being killed by criminals in the USA then they wouldn't need to go in armed and scared for their lives.
By definition, every person the police interact with is innocent, because at such time as they are talking to a cop, even being detained by one, they have not been convicted of a crime.
Personally as a teenager I’ve been met with a group of cops all pointing guns at me when I was just walking around at night with no weapons whatsoever. They got a call from a paranoid homeowner nearby.
They’re trained to shoot first and ask questions later.
I got pulled over in Cleveland and had a cop point a gun at me and threaten to shoot - I was apparently wearing the wrong color on the wrong side of town with out-of-state plates and reached for my ID instead of waiting for the cop to tell me to get it. In later stops I've been admonished many times for not preemptively getting out my ID, but I really can't help thinking about almost getting my brains blown out for grabbing my ID too quickly.
I had a rifle pointed at me about a week after I got my first car, because I accidentally drove on the wrong side of the median.
Guns are definitely pulled way more often by the police than they should be. but to your point I am okay with cops shooting anyone brandishing a knife or any other deadly weapon.
Pulling a percentage out of my ass that can't be terribly inaccurate, 99% of police encounters with guns drawn the police are under 21 ft away, at which distance a knife is as dangerous as a gun.
If someone is less than 21 ft from you and they are going to be using a knifes against you, then you should still draw a gun just as often as if they had a gun. So at <21 ft you think guns should be drawn less because they have knives you should also be thinking guns drawn the ~exact amount less no matter which of the 2 weapon they had.
I had a gun drawn on me and was told “I’m going to blow your f** brains out” because I was a stupid teenager toilet papering a house when I was young. That’s when fight or flight kicks in and logic goes out the window. Needless to say I didn’t fight.
> Personally I’ve had encounters with LE and have not had a gun drawn yet, so it’s obviously not the default.
How police respond to you is very dependent on a lot of factors, including your age, race, what you are wearing, where you are, and what time it is. I don’t think you should use your own personal experience as a universal template.
> And why would someone threatening people with a knife deserve benefit of the doubt?
Because, as a society, we should do everything we can to prevent harm to everyone, even people who are acting erratically. There could be all sorts of reasons for the behavior. Anyone can have a psychotic episode, and that shouldn’t immediately earn a death sentence. Of course, I understand that even an innocent person having a psychotic episode can be very dangerous, and I don’t think they should be allowed to hurt others, and it may be necessary to use force, and potentially deadly force, to protect other people.
However, I think that is very different than saying “we shouldn’t worry about the perpetrators well being at all”, or that it is preferable to kill the person rather than take ANY risk that they could hurt someone. The answer lies somewhere in between.
Most of the other places I'm aware of with such penetration of arms but no police basically rely on monetary bonds through family ties and intertribal appeals rather than trying to capture and imprison them. If the family won't accept the bonds and the criminal refuses to pay then they become an outlaw of sorts and have no recognition in society. A bit brutal, but then again so is mass imprisonment and a heavily armed police state. I make no claim whether it is better or worse.
I'm amazed at the number of people who are answering "this is just the way that it is in America".
I don't live in Adams County, but they are our direct neighbors here in rural southwest Ohio. We like Afroman over here. :)
I think the answer to your question is the warrant that they were serving involved kidnapping and an alleged torture dungeon along with drug trafficking charges. Yes, it may sound ridiculous on the surface, but an informant apparently testified to this and a judge approved it, so that's the warrant they were serving.
If one reads the warrant and considers the possibility that the testimony of the witness might have been true, then their show of force seems much less unreasonable.
Disconnecting his cameras? Stealing his money? That's absolutely not reasonable in any case. Afroman has a lot of support in our rural Ohio community, and we're all cheering for him. :)
In any game, if one side has 10x more accountability for misbehavior than the other, the low consequence side will keep testing boundaries until they are stopped.
Not even the most dangerous job in the US. Forest workers, commercial fishermen, pilots etc are more dangerous. If we're talking about gun violence, your corner market cashier is more likely to get shot, Has anyone thanked a 7 eleven worker for their sacrifice thas you can get a slurpee at 2am?
I don't think you can use this datapoint for this purpose. Cops are employing the paranoid strategies already, so there's no way to discern between 'these strategies are needless' and 'these strategies are effective'.
Depends on how you look at the numbers. But construction, logging, garbage collection and truck driving tend to be the most deadly depending on the specific metric (absolute, per capita, by industry, etc).
Expanding that, the deadliest part of being a police officer is almost certainly the driving component. No gun will save you from smashing your SUV into a pole. And the aftermarket modifications made to the vehicles aren't crash tested. A police cruiser is full of potential projectiles.
Curious how much this varies among police. Some jobs are by their nature always dangerous.
But there are a lot of cops in the USA, and plenty I'm sure have nice, cozy jobs, and then there are some who spend thee majority of their career policing areas that more closely resemble warzones or 3rd world nations but this isn't the majority by any means.
There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people. - William Adama
indeed, and this is unironically cited by the "shall not be infringed" crowd as a reason that they should be allowed to bring guns anywhere and everywhere, potentially turning any movie theater disagreement or minor road annoyance (or traffic stop, to bring this back to the police) into a violent life ending incident. to quote jwz out of context, "now you have two problems".
A famous case of this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Philando_Castile where the man identitified he had a concealed carry, the cop told him not reach for it, he started to say he wasn't, he was getting his license the officer asked for, with the officer cutting him off repeatedly and the officer shot him because he 'feared for his life'.
All they have to prove is that they fear for their life. It does not have to make sense, does not have to be 'justified', etc.
"All they have to prove is that they fear for their life. It does not have to make sense, does not have to be 'justified', etc."
That's not really true. The standard is a reasonable fear for your life. That's reasonable standard is evaluated in court by how a reasonable person would have reacted. Yes, they do give some deference to the individual who was actually there (police or civilian). The real problems happen because the DA and the courts tend to have bias when it comes to subjecting members of the system to the same process that others face.
Police officers in court cases don't have to meet that standard until it established that they do not have qualified immunity. In vastly more than 9 out of 10 cases, they do, and thus that standard is completely irrelevant.
A black friend of mine did exactly this, asked for a permission to get a pen from his pocket. The cop laughed “sure” and the moment he put his hand inside his pocket they jumped him and arrested him.
> The panel held that at the time of the incident, there was no clearly established law holding that officers violate the Fourth or Fourteenth Amendment when they steal property seized pursuant to a warrant. For that reason, the City Officers were entitled to qualified immunity.
And handed down in only one circuit, so the other 80% of cops in the country can say "well, in my circuit there was no established case law that said stealing the property was a constitutional violation."
That's not exactly consistent with the given scenario. Use of force issues tend to have much better case law at both the federal and state levels than property related issues.
> Corbitt v. Vickers, 929 F.3d 1304 (11th Cir. 2019): Qualified immunity granted for officer who, hunting
a fugitive, ended up at the wrong house and forced six children, including two children under the age of
three, to lie on the ground at gunpoint. The officer tried to shoot the family dog, but missed and shot a
10-year-old child that was lying face down, 18 inches away from the officer. The court held that there
was no prior case where an officer accidentally shot a child laying on the ground while the officer was
aiming at a dog.
> Young v. Borders, 850 F.3d 1274 (11th Cir. 2017): Qualified immunity granted to officers who, without
a warrant, started banging on an innocent man’s door without announcing themselves in the middle of
the night. When the man opened the door holding his lawfully-owned handgun, officers opened fire,
killing. One dissenting judge wrote that if these actions are permitted, “then the Second and Fourth
Amendments are having a very bad day in this circuit.”
> Estate of Smart v. City of Wichita, 951 F.3d 1161 (10th Cir. 2020): Qualified immunity granted for
officer who heard gunshots and fired into a crowd of hundreds of people in downtown Wichita, shooting
bystanders and killing an unarmed man who was trying to flee the area. The court held that the shooting
was unconstitutional but there was no clearly established law that police officers could not “open fire on
a fleeing person they (perhaps unreasonably) believed was armed in what they believed to be an active
shooter situation.”
(And a bunch of others.)
And a matching case has to be very specific:
> Baxter v. Bracey, 751 F. App’x 869 (6th Cir. 2018): Qualified immunity granted for officers who sent a
police dog to attack a man who had already surrendered and was sitting on the ground with his hands in
the air. The court held that a prior case holding it unconstitutional to send a police dog after a person
who surrendered by laying on the ground was not sufficiently similar to this case, involving a person
who surrendered by sitting on the ground with his hands up.
What was the outcome of the lawsuits against the agencies? You don't have to win a suit against an individual. Most of the big payouts have to come from the cities.
Not only that but if they claim they were afraid for their life, that excuse is used to justify any action, which works short of admitting wrongdoing on video and in post incident interviews.
A childhood friend's dad was a cop for 25 years; retired in the mid-90s. He never shot his gun, and only unholstered once in his entire cop career. My friend followed his dad, also became a cop in the exact same district; he's getting ready to retire. He's unholstered his gun countless times. He says he's shot at numerous people in his career, and even killed one dude. I once asked him what the difference was between his career and his dad's. He said crime was actually worse when his dad was a cop, a lot worse. But the big difference was the public's attitude and his training. He said the public had accepted the "tough on crime" narrative; that wasn't the case in his dad's days. But also, the training was straight-up military. He said that if he didn't use the military-style tactics, he would be sunned by his peers and even reprimanded. He said the training repeated one narrative, over and over: "It's us versus them."
He told me a story about a noise complaint. He said him and his partner banged on the front door of the house, but there was no response. He said they called in the status, but were told to wait. About 10 minutes later multiple SWAT vehicles arrived. He said one of the vehicles literally drove into the side of the house, making a huge hole in the house. About a dozen SWAT officers ran into the house, multiple shots were fired, the tear gas started a fire. The house was absolutely destroyed. ... No one was home; the house was empty. A kid left the TV on really loud when he left for school. A neighbor called it in, hoping the cops could just go into the house and turn off the TV. Worse, there was no punishment to anyone involved; the cops were doing as they were trained.
Are you sure about that? Police brutality has been reported as a huge issue in the US since at least the 60s. If anything, from the outside it looks like it's got better since Iraq.
No, treating people with hostility and escalating the situation only makes it more likely that someone will snap and attack a cop.
People generally do not shoot at cops, because whether or not they hit the target doing so is pretty much signing their own death sentence. All cops have to do to protect themselves is to not provoke people to fight-or-flight reactions.
They go around barking orders at people who haven’t done anything wrong because they look “suspicious,” escalate what could otherwise be calm encounters by showing up to everything armed to the gills, make it clear they can’t wait to use force against persons and property, demonstrate a consistent us-vs-them mentality that looks the other way for clear cases of corruption, commit brazen armed robberies under euphemisms like “civil asset forfeiture,” bypass policymakers wherever possible and lie to them when they can’t, and then wonder why some people don’t like them very much.
This will be a controversial opinion but I think some escalation by police is warranted.
The reality is there are aggressive people in society that have a tendency to escalate things. If police are trained to only de-escalate, it removes a powerful check on aggressive escalation.
The second order effect is an increase in events like people being pushed onto train tracks, glass bottles being thrown if you glance the wrong direction, etc.
I think optimally you have a police force that is trained in de-escalation but also escalates things slightly more than the average citizen and thereby provides a service to society as a buffer.
> That's how the police in America operate now; even for the most common interactions w/the public.
You cannot generalize police forces across the entire country that way. I've never had such an interaction with a police officer, presumably because the police department in my city is run better than that.
- the warrant was for distribution of narcotics and kiddnapping.
If I were to guess what a list of most dangerous warrants to execute, those two would be up there.
If you note in the video, he jokingly plays around the drugs part. I am not sure where the kidnapping part comes from, but Afroman is not necessarily a household name amongst middle-aged white police officers, so I imagine they just saw "drugs and kidnapping" and went for it.
The kidnapping claim was there was a sex dungeon in the house. The house does not have a basement.
And all of this was obviously pretextual, unless you believe drugs and women were hidden between cds or in whatever pieces of the kitchen they destroyed.
Situational training is a joke (based in part on tactics developed in Israel/Occupied Palestine, i.e., for a literal military occupation), load-outs aren't designed around need but as a hand-out to our arms manufacturing industry (laundered through the military), and the cops involved in these sorts of raids are literally chosen to not be intellectually curious enough to question it.
I used to operate a firearms training system. To this day, I wish I'd stolen the videos that they use so that I can prove how ridiculously unprofessional and biased they are.
It's a country with a lot of guns. Police do regularly get shot at when raiding.
And police departments get sent videos of every officer death from around the country and regularly watch them for "training purposes". So it makes sense that they are in a constant state of paranoia.
I wonder what the ratio of police deaths during no knock raids vs peacefully served search warrants.
I certainly believe that bursting through someone’s door with guns drawn is a high risk activity. It seems like maybe no one needed to do that in this case, though.
> police deaths during no knock raids vs peacefully served search warrants
Would have to be a randomized trial because right now obviously police only peacefully serve warrants in situations that are already very unlikely to be violent.
I think the traffic stop paranoia stems from a couple high profile incidents like
(1) Brannan in Georgia
(2) Darian Jarrott executed after the feds/HSI setup a drug sting but use NMSP trooper as a sacrificial lamb and then mosie their way on over after for the aftermath.
I've seen police in online forums reference these a lot when any talks come up of toning down their immediate instinct to draw their guns.
Basically in the US the feds will use local/state police as a sacrifice and not tell them that they're part of a sting of armed violent criminals so they're basically getting set up by HSI etc on purpose for surprises.
I’m not sure there’s a general trend of federal officers using state/local officers sacrificially, but no doubt these cases are hammered into officers’ minds over and over.
It's worth pointing out that, while being a cop is a somewhat dangerous profession, it doesn't even crack the top 10. It's much more dangerous to be a tree trimmer, non-airline pilot, logger, roofer, etc. than it is to be a cop.
What's more, a significant portion of that danger comes from the fact that they're driving around a lot and spend a lot of time by the side of the road and that means they end up the victim of crashes while on the job. The biggest risk when conducting a traffic stop isn't the risk that the people you're stopping might decide to kill you, it's that some dumbass thinks his texting is more important than looking at the road, drifts onto the shoulder, and plows into you.
Policing isn't in the top ten most dangerous jobs. It's usually listed around the 15-25th most dangerous job in the US. Many Americans including myself are regularly in more danger.
It's also interesting to note that while violent crime and homicide in the United States have been declining for many years interpersonal violence has overtaken accidents as the leading cause of police on the job deaths.
It seems unlikely the cause of this is more violence among Americans. Since the overall rate is going down. It seems like changes in policing and attitudes and tactics have resulted in more officer deaths from interpersonal violence. Perhaps more de-escalation would save more police officers lives.
That gives a homicide rate for cops of about 7.5 per 100,000. That's a bit less than twice the US national average, and about on par with the overall murder rate in the Carolinas or Mississippi. Seems pretty good for a profession that would logically bring a substantially increased exposure to murderers.
B isn't necessarily irrational. Many other types of death are at your own actions. Things like drinking alcohol, eating whatever you feel like, not exercising, doing drug, even driving, etc provide some self-identified "benefit" to the individual that they choose to partake. It's rationale that someone is more afraid of dying from an activity they recieve no benefit from than an activity they do.
This is such a common argument that’s basically a fallacy. Many of those dangerous jobs are dangerous because of human error. So it’s funny that you think 60% of deaths being on purpose is normal, what other job in the dangerous top 10 has 60% intentional deaths? Like seriously?
It's a common argument because police and their supporters regularly claim they need to roll up in tactical gear and treat every encounter with civilians like it's a life-and-death struggle because they have one of the most dangerous jobs, yet the truth is they have about an order of magnitude fewer workplace fatalities than roofers and loggers.
This is despite the fact that police regularly escalate their encounters, making them more dangerous for everyone, police included.
Maybe loggers need to start doing their jobs with miniguns like that scene in Predator.
Tens of thousands of no-knock raids every year in the us is crazy stuff. In the early 80s the number was ~1500/year. More than an order of magnitude increase in no knock raids while violent crime has fallen.
> It's a country with a lot of guns. Police do regularly get shot at when raiding.
Call me naive, but I think this could be solved by stricter gun laws. Yes, bad guys might have guns, but that's the case everywhere around the world.
But being afraid that everybody could have a gun and use it against you while doing your work must clearly change something in your behaviour as a police officer... Why not calm down the whole situation by reducing the number of guns then...
Unless you change the culture it will be just like the drug war. Firearms familiarity and possession are a cultural rite of passage for ~most males in the USA and there is no way to regulate that in a way that meaningfully stops it short of perhaps large-scale death penalty.
Pretty much everyone in Europe that wants a gun can have one within a couple weeks, the reason they don't only has a little to do with the law.
To get a gun in Norway i need 6 months in a shooting sports club. And then can only take the gun with me for shooting exercise. Strictly prohibited to have a round chambered when not standing on the shooting lane. And then only after an order from the guy running the training.
Most people, including myself, have no interest in jumping through such hoops to exercise a constitutionally protected right. We also value the ability to carry (mostly) anywhere we see fit for the purpose of defending ourselves in a worst case scenario.
Again, a bit naive, but that actually sounds okay to me. You'll learn to use the gun responsibly and in a controlled manner. What else would you want to do with it and why?
Sure, but I could print a reliable firearm with ECM'd barrel and make ammunition within a couple weeks if I went to Norway and so could most of your citizens, just following FGC-9 and "but what about ammo" instruction guides. The law says 6 months but in practice that's not the limiting factor. And then with no problem chamber a round and walk around with it in a backpack. The same applies in most of EU; of course in someplace like France or Poland you can straight up buy a black powder revolver over the counter which although heavy works quite well for most self defense cases with a firearm.
The fact is if any particular Norwegian decides today they want a gun, criminal record or not, and they have very modest means by Norwegian standards they will have it within a few weeks, no problem at all. Of course in USA criminal have been found many times with these self-made guns, now quite reliable and accurate, but a great deal of culture here is people will bear arms no matter the prison sentence hanging over their head or what the law says, and that is the cultural issue you will run into trying to curb gun possession in America. The fact Norwegians don't I think has more to do is that they don't view gun's as integrally to their natural rights and cultural imperative as much as Americans do, the physical potentiality is there for them to bear arms roughly widely as Americans do even without a change to law.
But not all States' gun laws are equally strict? So if the state with the stricted gun laws is acting in a constitutional manner then other states could also implement those laws but choose not to.
So a lot of this stuff is truly self inflicted and the result of poor policy choices -- not because of governments reluctantly but dutifully obeying the 2nd amendment.
What I meant is that I think German police, for example, are probably less worried that a traffic stop is likely to get them killed or have them escalate a situation to the use of lethal force.
I think this might be different in the US because guns are just much more common there.
I think that's true but it's not guns alone it's broadly cultural in nature. Different places are different. Even in the US there are vast differences between regions.
That's like observing that we could probably solve the issue of people saying mean things on the internet by requiring ID to access it. You have to consider any expected negative consequences as well as if you'd be violating any rights.
Youre aware that the rest of the planet have stricter gun laws and the American problems are fairly unique?
This is even after controlling for things that exacerbate crime like high economic inequality.
For instance, Brazil [1] (a much poorer and more unequal country than the USA) has lower murder rate than a lot of cities now than the USA. The murder rate of Rio seems to be about on the level of Houston (17/100k), or about a third of Detroit (47).
But Rio clearly has __a lot more crime__ than Houston. It's palpable when you're in either city. Even with the Favelas and heavily armed gangs, the murder rate is comparatively low because *normal people dont have guns at nearly the same rate*.
And it shouldn't take a leap of faith to figure out that higher gun ownership leads to more deaths. Guns are the one tool we have intentionally made to cause death.
1. I'm aware that Brazil has a higher murder rate, but comparing cities is a better pick. The northeast of Brazil is in another league than anywhere in the USA in economic conditions; it's not comparable. The only city I can think of with USA levels of economic development would be Florianopolis (murder rate 7/100k) or maybe Balneario Camboriu, or some parts of Sao Paulo like Vila Olimpia.
Places like New Hampshire have the lowest murder rates in USA but yet the loosest gun laws (New Hampshire has nearly European homicide rates but also a very European ethnicity type demographic). The murder rates in USA are tied way closer to where black people are than what the gun law is with the notable exception of New Mexico.
We've also seen it go wrong plenty of times. They can do them and we can do us I figure; I'm quite happy with my gun rights thanks.
There are highly developed countries that tightly regulate speech and network access relative to most of the west. Does that mean adopting an ID requirement to post on Twitter coupled with anti hate speech laws would be an obviously good thing?
It was an arbitrary example. Try to see past the politically charged topic to the actual analogy that I'm attempting to make.
The point of my original reply wasn't about the position being expressed but rather the stated reasoning. If your logic amounts to "Y could solve X therefore we should be doing Y" notice that when applied to other things that line of reasoning doesn't seem to hold up very well.
If you want to have a discussion about child mortality versus tail risks such as elections being suspended or the government murdering protesters a la Iran that's fine but please realize that wasn't the point of my earlier reply.
> We’ve seen other highly developed countries operate just fine without arming their citizenry to the teeth.
Good for them. As an American, I'm quite happy with our Second Amendment rights, I'm not looking to roll that back in the slightest. And if anything, with the recent rise of the fascist authoritarian regime that we've seen, I'd think that maybe a whole lot of "anti gun" people here would be well on their way to becoming "formerly anti gun" people.
All my life I've heard that an armed populace is to protect us from authoritarian government. Now that we have creeping authoritarians running the country, where are all of those "second amendment solution" people? What trigger are they waiting for, exactly?
Recall that this authoritarian won the popular vote ~18 months ago.
The protection is against a minority authoritarian government. If half the populace supports the guy in charge then taking up arms is effectively a declaration of civil war. That's a case of the cure being worse than the affliction.
Fast forward a year or so, suppose popularity has hit single or low double digits, imagine a blatant attempt at subverting the election process, that's where an armed populace comes in.
Look, I could pick up a rifle tomorrow, and march on DC by myself with the intention of toppling the fascist regime. And what would result? I'd be quickly arrested or killed and nothing would change. So what's the point?
But if I was part of a group of 1,000,000 like-minded people, then I might still be arrested or killed, but at least there's a much higher likelihood that some actual change would take place.
Now, as a lifelong believer in the "an armed populace is to protect us from authoritarian government" mindset myself, I have to say, I am extremely disappointed in a lot of people right now. People that I grew up with, that I've always trusted, respected, and maybe even admired. Because while fascism metastasizes and spreads through our country nearly completely unchecked, they all seem unwilling to even speak up against what's going on. And I can't defend their choices, but I can say that I still believe that there is a tipping point, some event, or sequence of events, that would kick things into into gear if needed[1].
[1]: I say "if needed" because it's not 100% clear to me that the only possible way out of this mess is an armed uprising. We might still be able to "vote our way out of this" and the optimistic take is that many Americans are sitting on their hands as long as they hold a shred of hope that that is still possible.
The more pessimistic take is that a majority of the "second amendment to protect us from authoritarianism" crowd are hypocritical ass-clowns, who are actually OK with authoritarianism as long as "their guy" is the one in power. :-(
But you won't get that critical mass without a spark.
People need to see action and see it work without repercussions to the actor.
People will take notice when someone like Thiel, Bannon, or Miller are taken down with a drone and the drone operator escapes arrest.
They'll think to themselves "Wait a minute, if someone can take out a billionaire I can take out that cop who raped my cousin and got a paid vacation as punishment for it."
What comes after that is anybody's guess but I predict an impending moment where individual citizens realize that they're not as helpless as they have been lead to believe and that technology can help them eliminate long-standing criminals operating in positions of power with immunity in theiry local communities.
As an individual person, having right to bear guns doesn't seem to have any impact or saving powers against the authoritarian regime. What scenarios relating to authoritarian regimes (be specific) do you find having a gun at home would help with?
> As an individual person, having right to bear guns doesn't seem to have any impact or saving powers against the authoritarian regime.
See my reply above. But loosely speaking, you are correct when looking at things from a purely individual point of view. No one of us is going to topple an authoritarian regime by ourselves. But I don't think that was ever the point. It's an assemblage of large numbers of like-minded armed individuals who can effect change.
And just to be clear... I'm a peaceful person at heart (but not a pacifist). I don't want blood-shed, and I don't want to see an armed uprising or a civil war on many levels. But I'd at least like to see many of my fellow #2A advocates being more vocal and visible about stating our displeasure with the current environment, and our willingness in principle to take action if/when it becomes clear that it is necessary. That, ideally, in and of itself reduces the need for actual violence, by acting as a strong deterrent.
Aside from the obvious (being ready and able to form an armed resistance) there's the deterrent. When you know that your populace has certain options available to them that will inform your actions.
You are naive for assuming that the government aren't the bad guys with guns. Just ask the 30,000 Iranian protesters that were slaughtered if you don't believe me.
That’s total officers shot, not specifically for raids.
A NYT investigation indicated there were “at least 13” officer deaths tied to forced entry raids from 2010-2016, so around 2/year. It’s unclear how many other fatalities happen in no knock raids. Given that there are only 50-60 total fatalities/year it’s surprising there isn’t comprehensive data for this.
Not a silly question. If you go back to the 2000s, you'll see the growing militarization of local police. This is partially an economic prop-up where the military can now sell police departments materials/arms/etc. and police departments can buy them. Thus the military needs more. Nice little situation they found.
At the same time as these departments getting more funding, it feels like most departments have decided its better to use taxpayer funds to settle court cases rather than train and be more selective.
It’s disturbing. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I were pulled over and my window and door is closed. If I reach for the door handle will the cop think I’m reaching for gun? Do wait for him to scream at me through the window? How do I keep from things escalating? Is there a place in the US where the cops aren’t totally insane? SF? Santa Barbara? Maybe Marin County?
Yes. Kind of. Anything involving home invasion I’ve usually seen them go in like an occupying force. Including the time i called them because a small group was going around the neighborhood trying to break into houses. They show up with bullet proof vests and assault rifles at the ready and pull everyone out of their houses.
Not many people watch them, but there are countless videos of police stops where it's not the police drawing a gun, but the driver of the car pulled over. Often it's not just pulled- it's aimed and fired. Some cops die, thankfully many get hit in the arm and it's non fatal.
It happens so much in the United States that you honestly can't blame the vast majority of at least being ready. That's not saying there aren't cops that are TOO ready and unclip the holster just walking up to the car.
Let me outline how broken policing is an institution in the US:
1. Cops are generally stupid and untrained. You just had to watch them testify in the Afroman trial and you might think "geez these guys aren't the brightest bulbs". No, theyre not. But they are also the most average cops;
2. Cops are corrupt. They steal things all the time. "We miscounted the money". Yeah, right. You got got caught stealing;
3. Cops lie all the time. They'll lie on the stand. This happens so often there's a term for it: testilying [1];
4. Cops never go after other cops. In fact, you're generally punished or even killed for going after other cops. It's career suicide;
5. If, somehow, you get charged with a crime, you as a cop have rights the rest of us can only dream about. You're not allowed to interview the suspect for 24 hours. Their union rep must be there and so on. Enough time to get their story straight. Why don't we all have those same rights?
6. Cops aren't trained to de-escalate. They're only trained to escalate, lethally. Cops kill over 1000 people a year [2]. A pretty famous example is the murder of Sonya Massey [3]. Sonya was lethally shot for being near a pot of boiling water. This case was also quite rare because somebody went to jail;
7. Some departments go so far to essentially be gangs. One of the most famous examples is the LA Sheriff's Department [4];
8. Should a prosecutor actually go after a cop, it's typically career suicide. Prosecutors live and die by conviction stats. It's how they get promoted and seek judgeships and higher office. Why? Because for there other cases, their cop witnesses will start missing court dates or even changing their testimony so your cases get dismissed or found not guilty.
A lot of TV is what's called "copaganda". It typically paints police as competent, not corrupt, honorable and not at all the job most likely to commit domestic violence [5].
One exception to this is The Wire, which is a portrayal of institutional failure at virtually every level of American society. For bonus points, We Built This City [6].
It's a much deeper topic why it is this way but unsurprisingly the answer can be overly reduced to "racism" eg the origins of American law enforcement are in slave-catching.
In Europe there's a maybe 0.1% chance that any random adult is carrying a firearm. And the vast majority of those are going to be rifles for hunting. In the US, it's more like a 3% chance. And firearms in the US tend to have higher capacity and higher rates of fire. Hence the default militaristic response from law enforcement. Or at least that's one of several reasons.
Considering this was a no-knock warrant, one of the probably causes being kidnapping (shady & possibly corrupt warrant in itself) where they broke down the doors, I'd say they expected some sort of gang activity or something.
If you break in with little to no notice or with a lack of manpower or if the occupant has nothing to lose, sure. This is why no knock raids are incredibly dangerous for all involved and generally a terrible practice.
With the number of officers they often have in most cases it would make more sense to start off slowly and unarmed, making an earnest attempt to communicate with the target. People won't usually choose to fight a suicidal battle. Even if they're extremely upset and disagreeable almost everyone will go along with it if calmly presented with a warrant and given some time to think things through.
and I would argue no knock is unconstitutional, the whole point of a warrant is to prove you’re allowed to search me and the law was written in a time where everything was on paper, we’re suppose to be secure in our papers short of a warrant, if you can’t show a warrant how do I know I’m not being robbed and need to defend myself? it’s totally bonkers
If you're there to arrest people, that seems reasonable. But if the goal is to collect evidence, you can't give them time to destroy it.
I do have the presumption that when professionals do things that seem weird, they probably have reasons that I as an amateur don't immediately understand.
I've also read enough Radley Balko to know cops often get away with doing awful and stupid things...
The department would actually prefer that to a scenario where someone is left alive to sue them for raiding 86 1st St when the unreliable informant said 96.
Also probably a rare case where there are a few Streisand effect's all packed together, where the cops at each step made it worse for themselves.
If they never did the raid in the first place, no music video, no "embarrassment". They could have cut their losses, and not made a big deal about it and probably way less people (including myself) would have ever heard about it.
Instead they decided to sue, which made even bigger news. Here they could again have chosen "You know what, maybe this is counter-productive, lets settle/cancel it", and again probably people would have cared way less about it.
Instead, they go to court, make a bunch of exaggerated and outrageous claims, one officer apparently cried as well, all in a public court room that is being recorded, again making it a bigger thing.
Finally, Afroman wins the case, leading to this now seemingly making international news, and the videos continue racking up views.
I know cops aren't known for being smart, but I have to wonder who made them act like this, don't cops have lawyers who can inform them about what is a smart move vs not? Seems they almost purposefully and intentionally tried to help Afroman, since they basically made the "wrong move" at every chance they got.
Of course. Questioning their authority is a status challenge, and they're accustomed to having their status go unchallenged. Hence, punitive punishment.
One of many aspects of improving law enforcement would be pointedly training out and averting any perception of being "above" people. "Public servant" is a phrase for a reason.
Yea it’s as simple and stupid as that. This (black) peasant isn’t respecting our authority and higher status. If we let one slide then everyone is going to think we are equal to them. In their logic, they have to fight in court.
This is a common archetype when people get challenged (escalation of commitment), they effectively double down. I don't necessarily think it was racially motivated (but also don't doubt that it could have been).
> don't necessarily think it was racially motivated
Growing up Adams county myself, I'll go ahead and be the one to tell you that it was absolutely racially motivated. You do not want to be a minority out there. Hell, you don't want to be perceived as being left leaning at all out there. This is the same area where a ~15 year old girl was assaulted on camera, in front of a police officer for participating in a protest (IIRC, BLM, but I could be wrong). This made the front page of reddit when it happeend.
And this is very likely, corruption motivated as well. I have enough family and friends left out there who have first hand experience with the politics and policing of the area to know. In fact, I have a late friend who had this exact thing happen (though, one county over), on video and everything. He's just not a D list celebrity with money, so nobody cared.
If someone wrote a documentary about this area and tried to pass it off as fiction, people wouldn't believe it, as it would be considered too absurd to be believable.
American institutions were set-up prima facie to be racially-motivated. Explicit references have been removed, but a lot of the structural elements that supported those explicit references remain. I know many people recoil at the idea, because it seems like an affront to their personal self-image and the national ethos (or at least its marketing), but I generally hold that if an institution acts in a way that's consistent with historically-aligned racial prejudice, it's actually on the institution to show that it wasn't a racially-motivated outcome, not the other way around.
Yeah, the only reason I'm not quite sure SLAPP is right is that he's a fairly prominent and well-off figure and they're a pretty small department. So I guess it's an attempted SLAPP suit, but they aimed too high (poor aim not being unfamiliar to cops).
Cops only know how to do one thing: escalate the situation.
Even when it doesn't make sense too. Like suing afroman. Like shooting blindly through a house like they did when they killed Breonna Taylor. Like the time they shot Charles Kinsey who was laying on the ground with his hands in the air. Like the deadly game of Simon Says they like to play. Like any of the millions of examples where they shoot someone who was submitting and defenseless.
That was what I was thinking at first too, but if I was sitting on their side, my mind would still go for "Wait, if we sue him, won't this make the news and make things better for him?" immediately, rather than "Yeah, this will suck for him". I'm not sure how they thought this would be bad for him, legal costs?
You're assuming a rational, reasoned process, rather than an instinctive punishment of a perceived status challenge.
When you observe someone acting in a way that seems obviously against their self-interest, it is always worth considering the possibility that there's some interest you don't understand...but it's also worth considering the possibility that they're doing a bad job of considering their own interests.
This is an event that took course over 3 years! I could understand the initial actions, statements and whatnot from the department to maybe be instinctual and emotional reaction to events/messages, but during these 3 years, at least one of them must have had some still time to reflect on what they're doing.
It's very easy to double down and reinforce your own past thinking rather than re-examining it. It's also very easy to "play a role", even as consequences play out; "reasoning" like "I will do X, then they will do Y which I don't want", rather than stepping back and thinking "if I do X, Y is likely to happen, I don't want Y to happen, so what should I do differently".
They assumed they were going to win, and thus enact punishment for questioning their authority.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them have already spent money in anticipation of a favorable judgement. Cops are largely immune from facing negative consequences so it was probably an incredible shock to lose.
They thought they were going to get a payday at the end. That tells you how d much they actually cared about their privacy/the privacy of their families, they were willing to sell it for a couple hundred thousand dollars.
Most "rational actor" theories of human behavior actually only work in the large (where the average can dominate outlier behavior) and in systems where rational action is a positive feedback loop ("a fool and his money are soon parted").
If those assumptions break down (especially the second, i.e. if foolish use of money results in more money accruing, not less), what we perceive as rational behavior should not be expected.
In this case however the story currently is two times(!) on the front page of haackernews (which isn't a music celebrity gossip site), bringing a musician into spotlight who's career was far from its peak. Hardly any better Marketing campaign one could imagine.
If the police possessed the self-control and critical thinking to not drag this whole thing into a lawsuit, I think the raid would likely have never happened in the first place.
I suspect that either this was some confidential informant who just reported false claims about Afroman and the police used it to get a warrant. Or the whole department is just corrupt and make up stuff to get a warrant in order to raid his house hoping to forfeiture his money.
They would have individually gotten lots of money in compensation if they would have won. So maybe the motives on their side are a bit more materialistic.
Not only aren't they known for being smart, but they're known for explicitly filtering out smart people.
The 2nd court of appeals ruled in favor of a city (New London, Connecticut) which rejects police applicants for having too high a score on intelligence tests.
In my view it's because the city or locality which those cops protect has been remiss, the community has been remiss in making sure that their police actually police in the way that the community wants them to police.
So obviously the community is getting exactly what it deserves by having its police force be legally liable for incompetent malfeasance behavior. Ultimately it will cost the community, Afroman himself, in tax used to fund the police, And then route that money back to afroman and his attorney for his legal fees.
An embarrassment. Humiliation of the community. Reinforcement and debasement of the community. Suppressed business attractiveness of the community for its plain lack of oversight.
US Police are trained such that their first impression in any situation is to see how people are reacting to their authority, and if it's not acquiesced to go on high alert.
It's not that they couldn't understand; It's that it's a faux pas to question this way of thinking so nobody does.
Play that out long enough and you get clown shows like these.
> don't cops have lawyers who can inform them about what is a smart move vs not?
Generally, municipalities have at least some sort of attorney on retainer for this sort of thing.
Generally. I don't know if that's the case where he lives.
Either way, the police have to be smart enough to listen to that attorney, and have to be given a consequence for not doing so. If you can brush off everything as qualified immunity and say you were acting under color of law while a part of a union that would raise absolute hell for any sort of corrective action taken against you, you might not be introduced to said consequence.
I have no evidence besides my own experience, but I think that the "back the blue" mentality might skew their support staff's objectivity a bit. Especially in smaller cities and towns where cops aren't just law enforcement, they are foundational pillars of morality and governance. The point I hope I'm making is that they are getting bad advice not because they are stupid, or the people around them are, but rather because it's inevitable due to complex social and psychological reasons.
> The point I hope I'm making is that they are getting bad advice not because they are stupid, or the people around them are, but rather because it's inevitable due to complex social and psychological reasons.
Which basically boils down to when the men with the guns and the violence (or their string pullers) set down a dumb path nobody is going to say "that's fucking stupid, you're stupid, good luck with that". It's gonna be a bunch of tepid "well the odds are long but here's how you could prevail" type criticism that lets them think their path of action is fine right up until it hits reality.
This. The cops don't care if they "look bad" because looking bad doesn't cost them anything. They don't lose any money. The populace is no more entitled to resist them so their jobs are no harder, their KPIs are not imperiled. Etc. etc. At best the municipality will scold them because the municipality cares very little, but not zero about police optics because it impacts their ability to do things that are unpopular.
This has curbed somewhat in small cities because of the insurance industry. Turns out that small towns need insurance to cover police malpractice, and those insurers don't like high-risk or overly aggressive police tactics. Turns out the police can be reasonable, if only they are even slightly accountable.
AIUI they sued him in their personal capacities, not as the police department. Any taxpayer funded lawyer to defend the PD from such a thing would presumably not be authorized to work a civil suit for a person who happened to be employed by his client.
I had never even heard of Afroman until 3 days ago when I saw some lawyers livestream the trial on YouTube. The whole thing seemed so bizarre and I was surprised why the case wasn't even summary dismissed by the judge in the first place.
Now Afroman has even more material to make YouTube videos of and humiliate these cops for eternity.
Tin foil hat version is that they’re looking for a payday where they can and if this didn’t work they can always check whether the police department failed them as an employer.
> Also probably a rare case where there are a few Streisand effect's all packed together, where the cops at each step made it worse for themselves.
It is not even that rare; some cases covered by Audit the Audit or Lackluster (same guy), or the civil lawyer. The amount of incompetence among many cops is surprising. They really literally don't even know the law or constitution. Just about anyone is hired. Quality standards are mega-low.
If I were in a gang such that I routinely committed theft and violence without consequence from the government, I'd probably have internalized that I am superior to the plebs. So I would expect what is obviously SLAPP to actually come out in my favor.
apparently, the deputy in question has a brother who was a deputy as well but was fired and charged with a sexual misdemeanor against minors.
Afroman also said he steals money during traffic stops and he was accused of that multiple times.
Of course that's not bulletproof evidence but a reasonable person might assume these rumours are not completely unfounded
EDIT: also the deputy of course didn't steal the money. He miscounted - when seizing the money he put 4630$ in the envelope but wrote 5000$ on it (which is the amount Afroman thought he had there)
> but a reasonable person might assume these rumours to be true
From all the claims Afroman made, it seems the cop sued because of the whole "He claimed he had sex with my wife, which reflects poorly on me", presumably because he only has a chance to win the suit if there is actual lies. The same video seems to have texts about how he crashed into civilians, stealing pills/money and more, but none of that was brought up in the suit, only the cheating part.
Although funnily enough, when one of the questioned about if his wife had an affair with afroman he was like "I dunno". If he doesn't know it's a lie, kinda defeats the point of the defamation suit
We are, of course, not privy to the jury's reasoning unless they choose to divulge it.
Which is unfortunate, because we may never know if they concluded "Given who you've demonstrated yourself to be, your wife is justified in seeking other lovers whether or not this allegation is true" or if there were other factors involved.
No, no way they could have known stealing money and destroying evidence is illegal. So the Post-It note on the old court case gives them qualified (absolute) immunity.
Almost too good to be true. They didn't find large quantities of weed, and afroman had cameras set up and caught it on camera. I mean, talk about landing with your bum in the butter. His career just caught a major reboot.
I love the Afroman story so much. Everything about it.
It does more to expose just how incompetent, entitled and corrupt the average cop really is, something I wish was better known. The cops who brought this suit are basically the biggest crybabies, are too dumb to realize it and too entitled to realize that others wouldn't see it that way. It's fantastic.
Compare this to policing in Japan [1]:
> Koban cops go to extraordinary lengths to learn their beats. They're required to regularly visit every business and household in their districts twice a year, ostensibly to hand out anti-crime flyers or ask about their security cameras. The owner of a coffee shop told Craft, "With Officer Sota, we can say what's on our mind. He's really like a neighbor. Instead of dialing emergency when we need help, we just call him."
American cops are a gang, by and large.
Cops have absolutely massive budgets, from small towns to big cities. Let's not forget Uvalde, where the police department budget was ~40% of the city budget and it resulted in 19 cops standing outside scared while one shooter kept shooting literal children for an hour. Because they were scared.
> Let's not forget Uvalde, where the police department budget was ~40% of the city budget and it resulted in 19 cops standing outside scared while one shooter kept shooting literal children for an hour. Because they were scared.
Not only did they not stop the shooter, but they actively prevented parents—who were willing to risk their lives—from intervening. They didn't just not help, they proactively ran interference for the shooter.
Even if this were true, are we really so far gone in the political discourse that we can't appreciate a win as Americans because of the perceived political orientation of the recipient?
I think the answer is yes, but I still naively hold out hope that we can eventually move beyond this.
I think he tried to be the Libertarian presidential candidate and made a song about Hunter Biden, so people just assume he's full MAGA and doesn't deserve 1st amendment rights
I mean, both him and Trump have similar approach to opponents or those who wronged them. In this case, the opponents are deeply unsympathetic to most, so it is harder to see.
I do see how someone whose reaction to being wronged is "I fucked his wife doggy style" could be attracted to the Donald Trump personality.
He’s willing to publicly criticize government corruption and child abuse, so there’s no way MAGA would accept him. (Both these stances came up in the defamation lawsuit and in the music video.)
When he ran for president in 2024, he registered as an independent, “citing inflation, the housing market, law enforcement corruption, and legalizing marijuana as key campaign issues”.
Even if he is ultra right wing on secondary issues (I have no idea) those are all anti-MAGA or bipartisan stances.
The problem isn't finding people who will publicly criticize child abuse and government corruption. The problem is finding people who actually will do something about those specific problems and not find some way to enrich themselves (or their supporters) in their name instead.
It's under the purview of the executive branch to determine drug scheduling
> The term "list I chemical" means a chemical specified by regulation of the Attorney General ... until otherwise specified by regulation of the Attorney General
That's good to know. The second sentence you gave was superfluous because the first one told us that -- I add this not to dismiss your efforts but to highlight them.
Pretty funny, worth seeing at least once to be able to reference it at appropriate times.
Having had my house raided, I love this. Police incompetence should be exposed at all opportunities with the hope that it makes some small amount of difference to future competence.
Hoping it wasn't the SWAT guys. Those guys go hard and everyone is a meth terrorist until zip tied on the floor and proven otherwise. They also tend to shoot your dog. =(
Judging by the videos, they look like the typical American "deputy" that wouldn't even pass the fitness tests in other countries, which probably means it's easier to escape, but also that they are more trigger-happy.
Mime was in Australia, so much lower chance of violence, more polite.
The incompetence was:
1. The entire suspicion was based on an IP address
2. They did no background investigation for potential counter evidence - they didn't even know to expect children in the house (school aged children that have been attending public school for at least 5 years each at that point).
3. As a result of the above, one of my kids was somewhat traumatised by being woken up with a police officer in her room
7 cops. They called in two more because I had so much computer hardware, so 9 cops altogether for an entire morning.
8 months later I get told I can pick up my (~$10k worth of) gear that they took. No case to answer.
Should never have made it to a warrant. Useless, lazy, waste of a lot of resources. And creates an entire extended family with significantly diminished respect for, and increased suspicion of, the police force as a whole...
... you know, that whole erosion of trust in the system that's playing out writ large right now.
Going on the stand and stating that you "don't know" whether the allegedly defamatory statements you are suing over are true or not is a... bold legal strategy.
The ACLU called it a SLAPP lawsuit. If true, they probably didn't care if they won or not.
That said, going on stand when your opponent has proven they can and will use your words and actions against you in the court of public opinion is a... bold strategy.
Honestly it was pretty ballsy of Afroman to release songs during the trial (which did come up, but I think they sort of ignored due to some law that changed in 2024?)
>Going on the stand and stating that you "don't know" whether the allegedly defamatory statements you are suing over are true or not is a... bold legal strategy.
if the statement is true, that's a defense against defamation.
if the statement is not believable, that is also a defense against defamation.
it actually was legal strategy designed to dance around the legal strategy behind those questions being asked, taking the air out of your insult
Are you saying you believe the cop who said, under oath, he "doesn't know" whether his wife could be having an affair with afroman chose to do that as part of a deliberate legal strategy? And that you think this casts him in a more positive light than merely being clueless?
That didn't seem like faux crying. Making fun of her in that way is the hardest to defend IMO, since it had nothing to do with her job performance or relevant character attributes. (E.g. how the other officer had been accused of stealing before, or had a brother resign from the force after being charged with a crime involving a minor).
Aren't cops by default public figures? They're the de facto face of the police for the ordinary citizen, not sure they should be the type of individual who cries because someone calls them fat, lesbian or whatever. These people have the legal right to essentially execute you in public, I think we should set the bar a bit higher on who should be allowed to be a police officer in the first place.
I was raised by LEOs. My mother and all four of her husbands were career long LEOs in the South.
Of course this is just based on my anecdotes, but LEOs have some of the thinnest skin imaginable. The first time I fought a grown man was when I was 13 and I had to fight my mother's fourth husband. He was a Deputy Sheriff and combat veteran and that dude had the emotional strength of a 12 year old girl who didn't get asked to the winter dance.
It seems the job selects for those types. I suppose people interested in law enforcement / justice that aren't that way either end up as lawyers or working for the FBI or something.
If you don't have any kind of marketable skills yet want to make a decent living with plenty of benefits, becoming a LEO is the easiest choice for most people.
Or if you don't have any marketable skills yet have a spouse that has a job with health benefits, you can become a real estate agent.
Those two career paths seem to be the most chosen for almost all of the 'not so bright' folks I grew up with.
It's a use it or lose it skill. When you carry a badge and gun around and can bark orders at people all day and they have to comply or face the infinite violence you can summon with your radio your skin will grow thin over time.
Power corrupts, or some half baked version of that.
It is viscerally against my cultural upbringing for the government to make illegal a verbal insult, it seems like an incredible overreach. I'm genuinely culture shocked hearing this. I'd be no more shocked hearing that it's illegal to dye one's hair.
I do agree with you and the other comment in this vein. I have very little sympathy for these officers.
However, there are different situations. For example, I imagine this person is not very surprised or upset to be called "dyke" in a verbal altercation. That is different from sitting in a quiet courtroom, knowing it is being filmed, watching a popular video where your gender identity and expression is repeatedly insulted.
Let's say the officer was black, the defendant was white, and made a video with lots of racist stereotypes. Would we think that was funny and cool? Would we be surprised if the black man had a breakdown in the courtroom watching it? We wouldn't even be having this conversation.
By all means, call cops pigs, liars, thieves, idiots. If you want to be racist, sexist, or call them pedophiles, I'll defend your right to do so but not be as sympathetic.
Otherwise we're just the hypocritical liberals as the right wingers accuse...
> say the officer was black, the defendant was white, and made a video with lots of racist stereotypes. Would we think that was funny and cool? Would we be surprised if the black man had a breakdown in the courtroom watching it?
This is very common in the US? Common enough to be a minor plot point in a current cop show (Cross), which is to say the audience will be familiar with the material. Also explored in e.g. True Detective. No, the Black cop does not get to break down in court while being racially taunted. Either on TV or real life. This is expected by all to be a part of doing his job.
I agree with you on the sentiment—I don't think it's cool to use racially charged terms or otherwise in degrading ways. That isn't to say my sympathy is lost. When you feel powerless you reach for power in any way that you can and trying to make someone feel bad for who they are is low-hanging fruit.
The thing I don't understand is why it isn't a felony for the police the disable the surveillance cameras! That alone should be a crime. I get that you need search warrants and protections, but you shouldn't be able to suppress the evidence of your work, since it's common for police to steal, plant evidence, or destroy property.
It is a crime, obviously. Things don't magically become crimes depending on the employer of the perpetrator - that's the whole point of "a nation of laws and not of men."
It's legal for you to arrest someone if you see them commit a felony. It's legal for you to arrest someone under a warrant if you are deputized by a Sheriff of the court (almost never happens, but legal). It's not legal for you, whether you are employed at a police agency or not, to vandalize someone's camera.
This is not some footage issue, there apparently was a smear campaign online.
FTFA:
> After making the music video, Foreman allegedly continued putting up social media posts with names of the officers involved, the lawsuit states.
> Several of the posts allegedly falsely claimed that the cops “stole my money” and were “criminals disguised as law enforcement,” according to the suit.
> They also falsely stated that the officers are “white supremacists,” that Officer Brian Newman “used to do hard drugs” before “snitching” on his friends, and that Officer Lisa Phillips is “biologically male,” according to the lawsuit.
The American police force originally started as a formalized slave patrol to capture runaway slaves [0]. It's well-documented [1]. We can try to argue whether modern policing carries that tradition, but case [2] after documented case [3] keeps bearing out more of the same. It's been the topic of research [4] and pop culture [5].
One, even if all police in the U.S. did start as slave patrols it is a textbook case of a genetic fallacy.
Two, your article discusses several origins of police forces in the US. In Boston it had nothing to do with slaves because Massachusetts was not a slave state when they created a police system in the 1830s. And since Afroman was raided in Ohio, also never a slave state, it does not make sense to carry over southern slave-catching history into modern police culture.
> The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838.
This is from your Time.com article.
Second, fugitive slave extradition was controversial in northern states and from your Wikipedia article several northern states even passed legislation to protect fugitive slaves.
And why would northern states spend their own tax dollars to fund police forces to capture slaves? It doesn’t make sense. They created police for public safety reasons in cities.
And even if none of that were true it still does not address the genetic fallacy. Just because some police forces started as slave patrols does not imply that all police today are inherently white supremacist.
You don't see how an organization founded to enforce a cornerstone of white supremacy may have a statistical likelihood of its members being white supremacists?
I've attempted to take your responses as made in good faith twice now, despite evidence to the contrary in other threads. I understand if this topic is uncomfortable for you, either because it challenges your world view or because it feels personally invalidating. It appears as though you're looking for one very specific statistic or logical vulnerability in what others are sharing to refute the overall claim. However, I can only lead you to water.
Your post is essential. No one is claiming 100% of cops are white supremacists. One is claiming that it's sensible to assume they are.
If 20% of cops were white supremacists, and I was a minority, it would be sensible to behave as if every encounter had a significant chance of being with someone is looking to ruin my day.
The majority do not need to be unsafe for me to feel unsafe around the community. You have to factor in the potential power they wield (to kill you or take your freedom or seize your assets), combined with the odds that one will do it because they have wrong headed ideas about race.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the claim here is "majority of cops are white supremacists". Thats not the claim. The claim is that it is sensible to assume a cop is.
A very different bar. A minority of cops can be white supremacists and because of the power they wield it's still sensible to treat them like every interaction is with a a white supremacist. As an example, a cop can legally kill you in many cases (or deny you freedom or seize your assets). If you had, say, a 20% chance of encountering a cop who was a white supremacist it would be sensible to treat every interaction as if that were the case.
Consider how unevenly weighted the outcomes depending on whether you assume a cop is racist when factoring how sensible it is to assume they are.
It's one data point in a pretty large body of evidence; the FBI thinks they're infiltrating law enforcement in a widespread fashion.
A fascinating study from Stanford looked at police traffic stops nationally around the daylight savings switch (as a natural experimental control) and found pretty hard evidence cops treat black drivers very differently during the day (i.e. when they can see their skin color).
People walking around with guns and badges should be held to the highest of standards. Suggesting an equivalence between the burden of proof on a hackernews commenter and individuals authorized by the state to detain, arrest, and potentially deprive citizens of a free country of their life, liberty or property is asinine and shameful.
Cops want the power to do all this, do it incorrectly, be unable to be held accountable, and then cry like babies when someone makes videos and mocks them. He could have just sued them directly to recoup his financial losses from them destroying his house over a bs warrant but cops have qualified immunity. The justice system gives him no recourse. They sued him for videos meanwhile his countersuit was thrown out on this basis.
If you support the cops on this I see no reason why one should not conclude you "wholly endorse" the ongoing "law enforcement" assault on free Americans. What principles do you take the nation to be founded on? You realize red coats coming into people's homes under the color of the law is what instigated the war that bought this country its liberty 250 years ago? I fail to see how this is much different, armed goons with guns and badges invading private property that cannot be held accountable. No election he can take part in will reasonably solve this so he can sue in a timely manner, as the unelected justice system has unilaterally decided you cannot sue cops over this. This is anti-American. Go read the bill of rights and tell me it is consistent with the spirit of those hard fought liberties to support the cops on this. I hope if you actually endorse burdens of proof you will at least support local, state and federal representatives who will codify into law a "repeal" of qualified immunity so that cops who fail to meet that burden can be held personally accountable.
Note a case on that count would still need to prevail on the merits. That is how justice is supposed to work. Instead a carve out for law enforcement has been created where you can't even take them to court. Your case is going to get thrown out. The justice system should not be creating this special class of people, with great power and depriving them of the responsibilities common between neighbors in a free society. What they have done is really not unlike the British sending armed men into American cities to violate rights and then insisting they cannot be held accountable in colonial courts as a matter of principle. This is criminal. People should be able to sue police officers. If that makes the cost of waving guns in people's faces more expensive then so be it.
> People walking around with guns and badges should be held to the highest of standards. Suggesting an equivalence between the burden of proof on a hackernews commenter and individuals authorized by the state
Let's take a step back. OP, essentially, made a very basic logical error (actually not an error IMO, but a willfully misleading statement).
They said, "Statistically, [assuming a cop is a white supremacist] a pretty sensible assumption."
In my mind, what makes something a statistically safe assumption would mean that, more times than not, you'd be right. So it'd mean that greater than half of police are white supremacists. They then posted a link to support that statement which said that some white supremacist groups are instructing their members to join the police force.
He's gone from the evidence of "some" white supremacist groups are telling "some" of their members among the police force to justify saying that it's a safe assumption to assume any officer is a white supremacist (greater than 50% chance for any random cop to be a white supremacist).
Considering that I strongly doubt the quantity of white supremacists that are members of white supremacist organizations in this county is even more than half of the amount of police officers, I very much doubt that the subset of individuals in the subset of organizations who were given this instruction and actually followed through on it comprises more than half of the police officers in the country.
To which I facetious said, "I'd hate to see someone use this kind of bad logic when deciding who is a criminal." Implying that, if the cops used the same logic on a neighborhood with criminals, it'd be sensible for them to assume every member of the neighborhood is a criminal. That point seemed to go over OPs head as he replied as if I wasn't making a facetious point and implied that cops do indeed do that. Presumably he thinks that's a bad thing when they do it but is perfectly reasonable for him to do.
I don't think anyone should be using faulty logic to make claims about groups of people.
> If you support the cops on this
I never said I did and, as such, the rest of this comment is not directed to me.
Do you personally know any police officers? I do and, as a group, I've found them to be more racist than the general population. I don't know what the working definition of "white supremacists" is in this context but it doesn't make me blink.
This phenomenon happens with more than just police too—I've seen it happen with medical
professionals, firefighters and EMTs as well.
0. Be a white person who has little to no interaction with non-white people in your day to day life.
1. Get a job where you interact with some of the dumbest people in the general public on the regular.
2. Some of those dumb people will invariably be, say, black. And you'll interact with way more black folks than the none you're use to interacting with.
3. Because you have no other association with that group your brain pattern matches and draws the connection.
4. Boom racism.
I find it hard to judge these people too hard because I haven't been "tested" in the same way. Like I want to believe I wouldn't fall down this pipeline but everyone says that.
We can't on one side ask for people to not make judgment based on statistics and on the other side saying that making a shortcut based statistics is valid.
Doesn't really matter since police officers are public officials. The bar for defaming a public official is actual malice, which is clearly not the case here. They need to prove that he deliberately said facts that he knew were false with the deliberate intention of harming them. It was also obviously a satirical song which further weakens the case. This is such a weak case it should have been thrown out before it ever reached trial.
Interestingly enough this is not the first time cops have invaded a famous rapper's house and the rapper proceeded to make a music video out of the footage
I don't understand how they found nothing in the raid, wouldn't they normally bring drugs with them to plant? If they forgot those that's a whole new level of police incompetence.
They tell us over and over again that we should have no expectation of privacy or not being filmed in public. Well, IMO they should not have any expectation of privacy or not being filmed when on private property.
Police, and government agents in general, should have no expectation of privacy when doing their job, period. If you have to hide your face then I don't trust you. And yes, that applies to all of ICE.
Is the NY Post some kind of National Enquirer analogue? This article reads like it was written by a grade school child trying to emulate the voice of an villainous news reporter.
I've heard "Randy Walters is a son of a bitch, ooooh oooooh, uuh!" the entire day today after hearing the song yesterday, probably the most catchy one to come out of this whole story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4AiuqQpB1U
I made this joke in another thread, but: I keep imagining Afromans court getup as the formal attire for American civil lawyers. Like robes and wigs, suits n ‘fros.
One of my favorite parts is when Afroman is being cross examined about why he brought the media and his lawyer to retrieve his money.
He says, well that was for my protection because they came to my house with AR-15's and turned off the cameras. "I didn't want to get beat up or Epstein'd".
And the lawyer is trying to make that out to be unreasonable, that a black man in the US shouldn't be scared of the police. Afroman just continues to assert that of course he was scared.
It's a small county with an extreme minority of black people, like a couple hundred or less. It's quite likely he had personally encountered some of these officers before, and almost certain they knew who he was. Within the realm of possibility he saw something like this coming. Small rural sheriff depts are astoundingly corrupt.
The Constitution guarantees the right to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects".
Which means what the Supreme Court says that it means. It's easy to imagine that it means something akin to what people mean by "privacy", but interpreting the Constitution is infinitely malleable so I don't have any idea what it means.
Defamation is the most boring version of this case. Barring dishonest editing, of course it's fine.
There are hypothetical versions of this that get more interesting. Ohio is a one-party consent state. It's not clear what happens in a two-party consent state. Law enforcement has no expectation of privacy in public spaces. Private is "it depends," think cases where low enforcement is discussing something with one party in a domestic dispute. If he had used bodycam footage, then you get into interesting copyright laws. Is it public domain, and if not, is it sufficiently transformative to qualify as fair use (think April 29, 1992 by Sublime).
> If he had used bodycam footage, then you get into interesting copyright laws
Not that interesting. The US government cannot create copyrighted works. Works created by the government are public domain. This is why Ghidra (made by the NSA), for example, has a really odd license, where the parts written by the government are "not subject to U.S. copyright protections under 17 U.S.C.", whereas future contributions by the public are covered under the Apache license.
Y'know, officers, if you'd shown up to his house after the raid and apologized and offered to buy the guy a new door of his choosing and the installation for it, we're probably not having this conversation.
This was also on youtube - Afroman made his points very clearly. That was an easy case.
Makes you wonder why taxpayers have to pay for incompetent cops all the time. I understand that some proection is needed, but the whole system is really defunct if such cases even (have to) come to court.
I know things are bad in the USA right now, but news like these show that you still have your basic rights. This kind of song would not fly in any other country on Earth. No other country has Freedom of Speech laws strong enough to defend against insulting the police. There have been some people abusing their freedom in recent times cough Kanye cough, but for every loud nazi there are ten more excellent people whose right to speak should not be infringed!
> This kind of song would not fly in any other country on Earth. No other country has Freedom of Speech laws strong enough to defend against insulting the police.
I'm fairly certain you could do the exact same thing here in Canada. I honestly don't think it's as exceptional as you're making it out to be.
Canada has better defamation laws than most of Europe (as truth is an absolute defense), but the US puts the onus of proving falsehood on the plaintiff, not the defense, in cases concerning public figures. The US's freedom of speech laws are one of the few truly exceptional legal constructs we should be proud of. Most other good legal concepts the US has pioneered have been copied to similar or greater effect abroad, such as the ADA and worker's comp.
> This kind of song would not fly in any other country on Earth. No other country has Freedom of Speech laws strong enough to defend against insulting the police.
What? You have no idea what you are talking about.
> This kind of song would not fly in any other country on Earth. No other country has Freedom of Speech laws strong enough to defend against insulting the police.
What? There's lots of antifacist/rather left-wing music that heavily critizes the police and their work. Usually not the one police officer himself but rather the institution as being part of a state who behaves injust (is that a word? non-native here...). I think that's fine and is part of a democratic system.
This wasn’t a 1A case, it was a civil defamation suit. He won because they failed to prove defamation, NOT because the judge threw out the lawsuit because of a violation of constitutional rights.
Separately: saying something shitty or unpopular that you disagree with isn’t someone abusing their rights to free expression. Expressing unpopular viewpoints that others consider abusive is exactly the point of such rights.
There’s a REALLY BIG reason it isn’t “freedom of expression, except for expressing racial hatred”, and it’s not because we like racism. Germany sometimes bans entire political parties that they declare unconstitutional. Now imagine that power in the hands of Trump. You can see what Putin did to Navalny for a preview.
You make it sound like Germany bans political parties every other year.
Germany formally only ever banned two parties:
- Socialist Reich Party (SRP), 1952
- Communist Party of Germany (KPD), 1956
For context: The Federal Republic of Germany was founded in 1949.
There are current discussions about banning - or evaluating a potential ban of - the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). If the ban went through (I think it won't), it would be the first in 70 years.
Perhaps interesting here is that some of the things he said were definitely not defensible via "truth is an affirmative defense." But it's ultimately up to the jury, and they can also find him innocent because a reasonable person wouldn't be offended by outlandish accusations.
(Ultimately, though, they can find him innocent for any reason. If they decided he should walk because you can't legally offend cops, that's fine too.)
Opinion is not defamatory. Satire is not defamatory.
With public officials like police, even false factual statements are not defamatory unless you knew they were false and lied about it specifically to hurt them.
Well, he probably interacts with them on a daily/weekly basis, or at least other people from their department, and probably don't want to end up on their bad side.
In the end, justice and freedom of expression seems to have prevailed, so doesn't really matter what the judge think/thought in the end.
If you think "justice and freedom of expression seems to have prevailed", then please consider the people who aren't famous and can't get media attention when this sort of thing happens to them. Justice and freedom of expression fail to prevail on the regular and this is just one win amongst many, many, many losses.
Even just in this instance justice would include damages for their destruction and an inquest into the warrant from the cop that wrote it to the judge that signed it.
Justice didn’t prevail. Afroman had to spend THOUSANDS defending himself in this bullshit civil lawsuit, and his countersuit got thrown out because police have qualified immunity.
This is after they raided his house, bashed in his door, broke his cameras, stole his money, and then didn’t charge him with a single thing (and only returned part of the money).
Which is great for him. The point being this happens to other people who aren't famous, and maybe don't want to spend their time asymmetrically fighting for themselves on social media.
How so? The positives you described had nothing to do with the courts. That's just an outcome of his own savvy. If he didn't make the video or the song, he would be out a lot of money. That's not justice, that's an entertaining person using their virality to claw back some of what was taken from them. How would that go for Joe Average?
This is the story of a guy who got sued for being harassed and had to waste years of their time and money fighting it.
One of the more interesting parts of the whole ordeal was officers getting on the witness stand and declaring that the lyrics that insinuated he had had sex with their wife were deeply traumatizing.
People keep throwing around 'cuck' as an insult, but if trained officers of the law familiar with application of deadly force when necessary can be severely traumatized by the notion of another man sleeping with their wife... Maybe the cucks have been the brave ones all along?
My understanding is he said "Adams county sheriff's are crooks because they took my money" (which is not disputed)., and individual officers, who weren't actually mentioned by name, sued because someone else was responsible for taking the money
I have a potentially silly question, and obviously naive - but why so many drawn guns? Fun music videos aside, what was the background here? Were they coming in on a Massive gang fortress? Or are all the stereotypes of American police forces true and they just come guns a-blazing all the time? I mean, that wasn't even police officers with hand guns, they have army-like guys with massive automatic rifles, and they seem to keep them drawn and hair triggered throughout the search? :O
(on aside, I do enjoy watching British crime procedural shows as contrast, where seemingly nobody has guns and they have to call in a special unit if they actually need somebody with a handgun)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_the_Warrior_Cop
Watch the short clip in https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/rcgkis/u... - American cops get shown Scottish cops' deescalation procedures, and they scoff at it.
"When you say preservation of life, it is… everybody's life. Ours has a pecking order. I'm just being honest."
> > I'm just being honest.
Just a salt of the earth officer telling it like it dog-gamn is. :|
I think she got a few "oh shit she spoke truth" reactions around her which is what prompted that.
I mean the key point there I think is the one where they point out that Brits simply wouldn’t accept police regularly shooting people. Policing for the people by the people.*
* and pretend Northern Ireland doesn’t exist, or course
It's rare even in NI.
PSNI had one single firearm discharge in the two year period covering October 2023 - September 2025.
Plus 948 uses of irritant spray, 496 uses of their baton, and 38 taser discharges in the same period. And 23,489 uses of "unarmed physical tactics".
That's for a population of around 2 million. By comparison, SFPD had 10 "officer involved shootings" in the past year for a population of 800k, a rate fifty times higher than that in NI.
True. The PSNI have had an excellent record – particularly given the difficult context they work in.
I guess the above poster is thinking of the shoot-to-kill era of the 80s (still well within living memory): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoot-to-kill_policy_in_Northe...
Yeah, it was very different back then. And not just the police - we had the army on the streets with weapons drawn, routinely aiming at passersby.
The political situation in the late 1960s provided plenty of kindling, but it seems clear that most of the sparks that actually caused the conflagration came from the barrel of guns held by soldiers and the police. They were directly responsible both for the death of the civil rights movement and the collapse of the government, and without the heavy-handed response it's likely that the settlement of the late 90s would've happened 25 years earlier.
It's actually a great example of why the militarisation of policing should be resisted at all cost.
In Britain, there is independent civilian investigation when cops kill a person. It creates pressure to not kill, because you wont be judged by buddies.
So are we all just oblivious to the fact that in the US, civilians practically have access to military gear? How can you police that type of population with sticks and stones?
I can see the argument how you would treat a suspect with a gun differently than you would if they have a knife.
However, American cops also use guns against suspects with knives or other weapons that they also use in places like Scotland. Why couldn’t American police use these techniques when the suspect doesn’t have a gun?
I know the standard response is, “well, they COULD have a gun!”, but I don’t think that is a good enough reason to always go straight to extreme response. If a suspect is brandishing a knife, he probably doesn’t also have a gun.
... how do you know if they have a gun?
As a fun example I had a coworker who collected handguns. I once asked him how many he had and he asked for clarification, should he include unregistered?
Personally I’ve had encounters with LE and have not had a gun drawn yet, so it’s obviously not the default. But I disagree, I think brandishing a knife is already extreme behavior, I don’t think it’s logical to think “because he has a weapon he probably doesn’t have another!”. And why would someone threatening people with a knife deserve benefit of the doubt?
> Personally I’ve had encounters with LE and have not had a gun drawn yet, so it’s obviously not the default.
What does the default have to do with it? We are already not in the default situation. Interacting with police at all is not the default! If you mean to say something like "it's not likely" or "they're not doing it in unreasonable cases" then your anecdote is not relevant.
> And why would someone threatening people with a knife deserve benefit of the doubt?
Several reasons, which would be obvious if you tried to think of them. Most knife-wielding maniacs are, well, maniacs, and aren't fully in control of their actions. Innocent bystanders are regularly killed by police discharging guns accidentally or inappropriately (in fact, even police are frequently killed this way). People are routinely misidentified by police as carrying weapons when they aren't. Police often give misleading or unclear instructions while trying to de-escalate, and with a gun drawn, failure to comply can and does result in the suspect being shot.
Bear in mind that what you are excusing is essentially a (substantially increased likelihood of) extrajudicial execution. It should be a last resort. It's not enough to say "well he's clearly a bad guy, why give him the benefit of the doubt?".
> Innocent bystanders are regularly killed by police discharging guns
False. Innocent bystanders are killed by police discharging guns, but rarely. And, while the goal should be zero, it will never be zero
Let's aim for a max of once every year, then, over the entire USA. And once that's achieved, let's aim for once every few years. Once a decade should be good enough, you probably won't get better than that.
The EU has a much bigger population than the USA, in a smaller space, and I'd bet they're already around this number.
The EU doesn't have armed criminals like the USA. The EU also doesn't have police being killed by criminals. It's close to 50 to 1.
Well... the sicilian mafia comes to mind... the french can be quite violent too... Western Europe is not so bad either, with guns.
I guess you mean "normal" non-criminal people in the EU are not allowed to have AR-15 assault rifles in their homes, that they can use if they have mental health issues.
I personally believe that is one of the reasons the USA has so much gun violence. Get rid of the guns in people's homes and things will change.
Why is it not zero? This strikes me as the exact sort of calculus they used way back when they stopped chasing fleeing suspects in vehicles: the danger to the public is too high to justify the use of force. If you can't hit your suspect without hitting other civilians, then don't fucking fire! And no I don't particularly care if the LEO's life might be in danger either, that's literally the job they signed up for: to put themselves in danger to enforce the law. It's ridiculous that cops just get complete power of life and death every time they feel a spot of stress, and have to be handled with kid gloves by the general public less they be murdered in the streets.
I will never be zero because perfection is impossible. It's like saying there should be zero car fatalities. We should work to get them down (enforcement against drunk driving, maybe checkpoints, stronger driving tests), but asking for zero accidents just isn't reality.
> It's like saying there should be zero car fatalities.
https://www.politico.eu/article/helsinki-no-traffic-death-ro...
"Helsinki hasn’t registered a single traffic-related fatality in the past year, municipal officials revealed this week."
"The limits were enforced with 70 new speed cameras and a policing strategy based on the national “Vision Zero” policy, with the goal of achieving zero traffic injuries or deaths. Data collected by Liikenneturva, Finland’s traffic safety entity, shows Helsinki’s traffic fatalities have been declining ever since."
That's one city, for one year. Their rate of traffic fatalities is still above zero, I guarantee you.
That's not analogous at all. Everyone drives, and so everyone is a possible source of a car crash. Police are not (in theory) just whoever wanders into the goddamn precinct. They're (in theory) trained professionals, educated in what they do, and therefore entrusted with both the force of law, and the deadly force they wear on their belts.
And no we probably can't make it ZERO, but we could surely get it under 1,300!?
1300 is not the rate of innocent bystanders being killed. It's the rate of people killed by police period. Maybe if we didn't have police being killed by criminals in the USA then they wouldn't need to go in armed and scared for their lives.
By definition, every person the police interact with is innocent, because at such time as they are talking to a cop, even being detained by one, they have not been convicted of a crime.
That's not the definition of 'innocent', and that argument extremely falls apart when the word 'bystander' isn't omitted.
Come on, you know what people are talking about when they say "innocent bystander".
Has anyone done a study on correlation between no-chase policy and increase in robbery or retail theft? Would be pretty interesting
Personally as a teenager I’ve been met with a group of cops all pointing guns at me when I was just walking around at night with no weapons whatsoever. They got a call from a paranoid homeowner nearby. They’re trained to shoot first and ask questions later.
> They’re trained to shoot first and ask questions later.
If this was true, would you have survived?
I got pulled over in Cleveland and had a cop point a gun at me and threaten to shoot - I was apparently wearing the wrong color on the wrong side of town with out-of-state plates and reached for my ID instead of waiting for the cop to tell me to get it. In later stops I've been admonished many times for not preemptively getting out my ID, but I really can't help thinking about almost getting my brains blown out for grabbing my ID too quickly.
I had a rifle pointed at me about a week after I got my first car, because I accidentally drove on the wrong side of the median.
Guns are definitely pulled way more often by the police than they should be. but to your point I am okay with cops shooting anyone brandishing a knife or any other deadly weapon.
In most civilized societies, there's an extremely high chance that somebody wielding a knife doesn't have a gun.
Wielding a knife is a deadly threat so I am not sure what the relevance is.
The relevance is that you don’t need to assume that the knife wielding person can hit you from a distance.
One way or the other, this doesn’t seem to be a problem in other countries.
Pulling a percentage out of my ass that can't be terribly inaccurate, 99% of police encounters with guns drawn the police are under 21 ft away, at which distance a knife is as dangerous as a gun.
If someone is less than 21 ft from you and they are going to be using a knifes against you, then you should still draw a gun just as often as if they had a gun. So at <21 ft you think guns should be drawn less because they have knives you should also be thinking guns drawn the ~exact amount less no matter which of the 2 weapon they had.
And one way or the other, none of that is a problem is other countries.
I had a gun drawn on me and was told “I’m going to blow your f** brains out” because I was a stupid teenager toilet papering a house when I was young. That’s when fight or flight kicks in and logic goes out the window. Needless to say I didn’t fight.
> Personally I’ve had encounters with LE and have not had a gun drawn yet, so it’s obviously not the default.
How police respond to you is very dependent on a lot of factors, including your age, race, what you are wearing, where you are, and what time it is. I don’t think you should use your own personal experience as a universal template.
> And why would someone threatening people with a knife deserve benefit of the doubt?
Because, as a society, we should do everything we can to prevent harm to everyone, even people who are acting erratically. There could be all sorts of reasons for the behavior. Anyone can have a psychotic episode, and that shouldn’t immediately earn a death sentence. Of course, I understand that even an innocent person having a psychotic episode can be very dangerous, and I don’t think they should be allowed to hurt others, and it may be necessary to use force, and potentially deadly force, to protect other people.
However, I think that is very different than saying “we shouldn’t worry about the perpetrators well being at all”, or that it is preferable to kill the person rather than take ANY risk that they could hurt someone. The answer lies somewhere in between.
Most of the other places I'm aware of with such penetration of arms but no police basically rely on monetary bonds through family ties and intertribal appeals rather than trying to capture and imprison them. If the family won't accept the bonds and the criminal refuses to pay then they become an outlaw of sorts and have no recognition in society. A bit brutal, but then again so is mass imprisonment and a heavily armed police state. I make no claim whether it is better or worse.
I'm amazed at the number of people who are answering "this is just the way that it is in America".
I don't live in Adams County, but they are our direct neighbors here in rural southwest Ohio. We like Afroman over here. :)
I think the answer to your question is the warrant that they were serving involved kidnapping and an alleged torture dungeon along with drug trafficking charges. Yes, it may sound ridiculous on the surface, but an informant apparently testified to this and a judge approved it, so that's the warrant they were serving.
If one reads the warrant and considers the possibility that the testimony of the witness might have been true, then their show of force seems much less unreasonable.
Disconnecting his cameras? Stealing his money? That's absolutely not reasonable in any case. Afroman has a lot of support in our rural Ohio community, and we're all cheering for him. :)
Its not even police specific.
In any game, if one side has 10x more accountability for misbehavior than the other, the low consequence side will keep testing boundaries until they are stopped.
American police are trained to be afraid. They escalate situations constantly. They're trained that every traffic stop is LIKELY their last.
I've had a gun pulled on me twice for traffic stops when I went to grab something. I'm white.
Not even the most dangerous job in the US. Forest workers, commercial fishermen, pilots etc are more dangerous. If we're talking about gun violence, your corner market cashier is more likely to get shot, Has anyone thanked a 7 eleven worker for their sacrifice thas you can get a slurpee at 2am?
I don't think you can use this datapoint for this purpose. Cops are employing the paranoid strategies already, so there's no way to discern between 'these strategies are needless' and 'these strategies are effective'.
Roofing, I think, tends to be the most dangerous.
Depends how you define dangerous. If we look injury rates and not deaths, meat processing/packing is the most dangerous.
Depends on how you look at the numbers. But construction, logging, garbage collection and truck driving tend to be the most deadly depending on the specific metric (absolute, per capita, by industry, etc).
Expanding that, the deadliest part of being a police officer is almost certainly the driving component. No gun will save you from smashing your SUV into a pole. And the aftermarket modifications made to the vehicles aren't crash tested. A police cruiser is full of potential projectiles.
Its more dangerous being a spouse to a cop than it is to be a cop.
Curious how much this varies among police. Some jobs are by their nature always dangerous.
But there are a lot of cops in the USA, and plenty I'm sure have nice, cozy jobs, and then there are some who spend thee majority of their career policing areas that more closely resemble warzones or 3rd world nations but this isn't the majority by any means.
Probably the most dangerous aspect of the job in the US is driving.
For a bit, it was COVID. https://abcnews.com/Health/covid-leading-cause-law-enforceme...
Neither working as a 7 eleven worker nor a cop is a sacrifice, it's a free labor market.
I have seen some shit go down in 7/11's at 1am. You are not kidding.
If only your country operated on the Peelian principles of policing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
Relevant fictional quote:
There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people. - William Adama
Is that a problem for the Gendarmerie?
In the US police have no obligation to protect the people.
indeed, and this is unironically cited by the "shall not be infringed" crowd as a reason that they should be allowed to bring guns anywhere and everywhere, potentially turning any movie theater disagreement or minor road annoyance (or traffic stop, to bring this back to the police) into a violent life ending incident. to quote jwz out of context, "now you have two problems".
> I've had a gun pulled on me twice for traffic stops when I went to grab something. I'm white.
Something I learned from a friend is to ask permission for every movement or at the very least narrate and move slowly.
"I'm going to reach in the glovebox for my registration. Is that ok?"
I think it's the only way to protect yourself from their hyper-nervousness.
Edit: friend and I are also white.
A famous case of this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Philando_Castile where the man identitified he had a concealed carry, the cop told him not reach for it, he started to say he wasn't, he was getting his license the officer asked for, with the officer cutting him off repeatedly and the officer shot him because he 'feared for his life'.
All they have to prove is that they fear for their life. It does not have to make sense, does not have to be 'justified', etc.
"All they have to prove is that they fear for their life. It does not have to make sense, does not have to be 'justified', etc."
That's not really true. The standard is a reasonable fear for your life. That's reasonable standard is evaluated in court by how a reasonable person would have reacted. Yes, they do give some deference to the individual who was actually there (police or civilian). The real problems happen because the DA and the courts tend to have bias when it comes to subjecting members of the system to the same process that others face.
Police officers in court cases don't have to meet that standard until it established that they do not have qualified immunity. In vastly more than 9 out of 10 cases, they do, and thus that standard is completely irrelevant.
Qualified immunity only applies to civil cases, not criminal.
Most (not all) cases against police officers for excessive/fatal use of force are civil (typically civil rights violations).
> All they have to prove is that they fear for their life.
In which case, they should spend the rest of their life in a high-security psychiatric hospital.
They're obviously too mentally fragile to be allowed out in the world.
A black friend of mine did exactly this, asked for a permission to get a pen from his pocket. The cop laughed “sure” and the moment he put his hand inside his pocket they jumped him and arrested him.
With body cameras this is a lawsuit.
But is it a winning one?
Qualified immunity tends to chime in.
That doesn't mean what you think it means.
No? Jessop v. City of Fresno is worth a peek.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/17...
> The panel held that at the time of the incident, there was no clearly established law holding that officers violate the Fourth or Fourteenth Amendment when they steal property seized pursuant to a warrant. For that reason, the City Officers were entitled to qualified immunity.
And handed down in only one circuit, so the other 80% of cops in the country can say "well, in my circuit there was no established case law that said stealing the property was a constitutional violation."
That's not exactly consistent with the given scenario. Use of force issues tend to have much better case law at both the federal and state levels than property related issues.
https://www.generalservices.state.nm.us/wp-content/uploads/9...
> Corbitt v. Vickers, 929 F.3d 1304 (11th Cir. 2019): Qualified immunity granted for officer who, hunting a fugitive, ended up at the wrong house and forced six children, including two children under the age of three, to lie on the ground at gunpoint. The officer tried to shoot the family dog, but missed and shot a 10-year-old child that was lying face down, 18 inches away from the officer. The court held that there was no prior case where an officer accidentally shot a child laying on the ground while the officer was aiming at a dog.
> Young v. Borders, 850 F.3d 1274 (11th Cir. 2017): Qualified immunity granted to officers who, without a warrant, started banging on an innocent man’s door without announcing themselves in the middle of the night. When the man opened the door holding his lawfully-owned handgun, officers opened fire, killing. One dissenting judge wrote that if these actions are permitted, “then the Second and Fourth Amendments are having a very bad day in this circuit.”
> Estate of Smart v. City of Wichita, 951 F.3d 1161 (10th Cir. 2020): Qualified immunity granted for officer who heard gunshots and fired into a crowd of hundreds of people in downtown Wichita, shooting bystanders and killing an unarmed man who was trying to flee the area. The court held that the shooting was unconstitutional but there was no clearly established law that police officers could not “open fire on a fleeing person they (perhaps unreasonably) believed was armed in what they believed to be an active shooter situation.”
(And a bunch of others.)
And a matching case has to be very specific:
> Baxter v. Bracey, 751 F. App’x 869 (6th Cir. 2018): Qualified immunity granted for officers who sent a police dog to attack a man who had already surrendered and was sitting on the ground with his hands in the air. The court held that a prior case holding it unconstitutional to send a police dog after a person who surrendered by laying on the ground was not sufficiently similar to this case, involving a person who surrendered by sitting on the ground with his hands up.
"No clearly established law", my ass.
What was the outcome of the lawsuits against the agencies? You don't have to win a suit against an individual. Most of the big payouts have to come from the cities.
Here are a bunch going the other way. https://policefundingdatabase.org/explore-the-database/settl...
I never said that qualified immunity wasn't an issue, just that there tends to be more protections when use of force is involved than with property.
> Most of the big payouts have to come from the cities.
In other words, from the victimized populace.
I think a cop who steals seized evidence should be personally liable to the person they stole from.
(…and I'd note "v. City of Wichita" is clearly responsive to your question.)
Yeah, the "qualified" part is relatively misleading, it makes it sound like there are clear limits to police immunity.
> I think it's the only way to protect yourself from their hyper-nervousness.
“the only way” puts me in mind of The Onion headline “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens”
Not only that but if they claim they were afraid for their life, that excuse is used to justify any action, which works short of admitting wrongdoing on video and in post incident interviews.
It started after the Iraq war. They got Hummers and vets.
A childhood friend's dad was a cop for 25 years; retired in the mid-90s. He never shot his gun, and only unholstered once in his entire cop career. My friend followed his dad, also became a cop in the exact same district; he's getting ready to retire. He's unholstered his gun countless times. He says he's shot at numerous people in his career, and even killed one dude. I once asked him what the difference was between his career and his dad's. He said crime was actually worse when his dad was a cop, a lot worse. But the big difference was the public's attitude and his training. He said the public had accepted the "tough on crime" narrative; that wasn't the case in his dad's days. But also, the training was straight-up military. He said that if he didn't use the military-style tactics, he would be sunned by his peers and even reprimanded. He said the training repeated one narrative, over and over: "It's us versus them."
He told me a story about a noise complaint. He said him and his partner banged on the front door of the house, but there was no response. He said they called in the status, but were told to wait. About 10 minutes later multiple SWAT vehicles arrived. He said one of the vehicles literally drove into the side of the house, making a huge hole in the house. About a dozen SWAT officers ran into the house, multiple shots were fired, the tear gas started a fire. The house was absolutely destroyed. ... No one was home; the house was empty. A kid left the TV on really loud when he left for school. A neighbor called it in, hoping the cops could just go into the house and turn off the TV. Worse, there was no punishment to anyone involved; the cops were doing as they were trained.
Are you sure about that? Police brutality has been reported as a huge issue in the US since at least the 60s. If anything, from the outside it looks like it's got better since Iraq.
The MOVE bombing was well before the Iraq war.
not only trained that way, the justice system upholds this by not prosecuting police violence in any meaningful way
Could also be that this is at least partially justified due to the incredible pervasiveness of guns in the US.
No, treating people with hostility and escalating the situation only makes it more likely that someone will snap and attack a cop.
People generally do not shoot at cops, because whether or not they hit the target doing so is pretty much signing their own death sentence. All cops have to do to protect themselves is to not provoke people to fight-or-flight reactions.
“Warrior mindset”. When you’re trained to assume that everyone you interact with is a lethal threat, you tend to react as such.
They go around barking orders at people who haven’t done anything wrong because they look “suspicious,” escalate what could otherwise be calm encounters by showing up to everything armed to the gills, make it clear they can’t wait to use force against persons and property, demonstrate a consistent us-vs-them mentality that looks the other way for clear cases of corruption, commit brazen armed robberies under euphemisms like “civil asset forfeiture,” bypass policymakers wherever possible and lie to them when they can’t, and then wonder why some people don’t like them very much.
This will be a controversial opinion but I think some escalation by police is warranted.
The reality is there are aggressive people in society that have a tendency to escalate things. If police are trained to only de-escalate, it removes a powerful check on aggressive escalation.
The second order effect is an increase in events like people being pushed onto train tracks, glass bottles being thrown if you glance the wrong direction, etc.
I think optimally you have a police force that is trained in de-escalation but also escalates things slightly more than the average citizen and thereby provides a service to society as a buffer.
I don't think you understand what "de-escalation" is. It's not ignoring antisocial behavior or failing to confront people.
#1 - He's Black.
#2 - That's how the police in America operate now; even for the most common interactions w/the public.
I know this may sound like I'm being an asshole, but I'm not.
> That's how the police in America operate now; even for the most common interactions w/the public.
You cannot generalize police forces across the entire country that way. I've never had such an interaction with a police officer, presumably because the police department in my city is run better than that.
Are you white?
That's lucky. My county sheriff implemented predictive policing [1] until they were forced to stop because of many constitutional violations.
1. https://ij.org/press-release/case-closed-pasco-sheriff-admit...
They did the same when they raided Roger Stone.
If you were to take a positive intent approach:
- the warrant was for distribution of narcotics and kiddnapping.
If I were to guess what a list of most dangerous warrants to execute, those two would be up there.
If you note in the video, he jokingly plays around the drugs part. I am not sure where the kidnapping part comes from, but Afroman is not necessarily a household name amongst middle-aged white police officers, so I imagine they just saw "drugs and kidnapping" and went for it.
And that's part of the issue.
The kidnapping claim was there was a sex dungeon in the house. The house does not have a basement.
And all of this was obviously pretextual, unless you believe drugs and women were hidden between cds or in whatever pieces of the kitchen they destroyed.
Gotta check between the slices of cake, never know what it could be hiding
Situational training is a joke (based in part on tactics developed in Israel/Occupied Palestine, i.e., for a literal military occupation), load-outs aren't designed around need but as a hand-out to our arms manufacturing industry (laundered through the military), and the cops involved in these sorts of raids are literally chosen to not be intellectually curious enough to question it.
I used to operate a firearms training system. To this day, I wish I'd stolen the videos that they use so that I can prove how ridiculously unprofessional and biased they are.
It's a country with a lot of guns. Police do regularly get shot at when raiding.
And police departments get sent videos of every officer death from around the country and regularly watch them for "training purposes". So it makes sense that they are in a constant state of paranoia.
> Police do regularly get shot at when raiding.
I wonder what the ratio of police deaths during no knock raids vs peacefully served search warrants.
I certainly believe that bursting through someone’s door with guns drawn is a high risk activity. It seems like maybe no one needed to do that in this case, though.
> police deaths during no knock raids vs peacefully served search warrants
Would have to be a randomized trial because right now obviously police only peacefully serve warrants in situations that are already very unlikely to be violent.
There's likely natural experiments in cases where police was misinformed either way about the danger of the suspects being arrested.
I think the traffic stop paranoia stems from a couple high profile incidents like
(1) Brannan in Georgia
(2) Darian Jarrott executed after the feds/HSI setup a drug sting but use NMSP trooper as a sacrificial lamb and then mosie their way on over after for the aftermath.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Police_Shootout_-_De...
[2] https://youtu.be/NqxTf-Vz12o?t=475
I've seen police in online forums reference these a lot when any talks come up of toning down their immediate instinct to draw their guns.
Basically in the US the feds will use local/state police as a sacrifice and not tell them that they're part of a sting of armed violent criminals so they're basically getting set up by HSI etc on purpose for surprises.
I’m not sure there’s a general trend of federal officers using state/local officers sacrificially, but no doubt these cases are hammered into officers’ minds over and over.
It's worth pointing out that, while being a cop is a somewhat dangerous profession, it doesn't even crack the top 10. It's much more dangerous to be a tree trimmer, non-airline pilot, logger, roofer, etc. than it is to be a cop.
What's more, a significant portion of that danger comes from the fact that they're driving around a lot and spend a lot of time by the side of the road and that means they end up the victim of crashes while on the job. The biggest risk when conducting a traffic stop isn't the risk that the people you're stopping might decide to kill you, it's that some dumbass thinks his texting is more important than looking at the road, drifts onto the shoulder, and plows into you.
Policing isn't in the top ten most dangerous jobs. It's usually listed around the 15-25th most dangerous job in the US. Many Americans including myself are regularly in more danger.
Also around 40% of police deaths are accidents.
It's also interesting to note that while violent crime and homicide in the United States have been declining for many years interpersonal violence has overtaken accidents as the leading cause of police on the job deaths.
It seems unlikely the cause of this is more violence among Americans. Since the overall rate is going down. It seems like changes in policing and attitudes and tactics have resulted in more officer deaths from interpersonal violence. Perhaps more de-escalation would save more police officers lives.
>interpersonal violence has overtaken accidents as the leading cause of police on the job deaths.
Do you have a source for this? Not trying to argue, I would genuinely like to read more.
Upon closer inspection it seems it's more a result of decreasing accident rates than increasing homicide rates although that is a factor lately.
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-police-officers-die-i...
That gives a homicide rate for cops of about 7.5 per 100,000. That's a bit less than twice the US national average, and about on par with the overall murder rate in the Carolinas or Mississippi. Seems pretty good for a profession that would logically bring a substantially increased exposure to murderers.
To really emphasize this, car crashes are the top source of police deaths. Yet less than 50% of police use their seat belts.
The justification most give is that they may need to be able to quickly get out of a car and pull their gun in a confrontation.
The only way this makes sense is that
A) Police aren't being properly trained based on data
B) People have an irrational psychological fear of murder over other types of death
A is the likely part.
B isn't necessarily irrational. Many other types of death are at your own actions. Things like drinking alcohol, eating whatever you feel like, not exercising, doing drug, even driving, etc provide some self-identified "benefit" to the individual that they choose to partake. It's rationale that someone is more afraid of dying from an activity they recieve no benefit from than an activity they do.
This is such a common argument that’s basically a fallacy. Many of those dangerous jobs are dangerous because of human error. So it’s funny that you think 60% of deaths being on purpose is normal, what other job in the dangerous top 10 has 60% intentional deaths? Like seriously?
It's a common argument because police and their supporters regularly claim they need to roll up in tactical gear and treat every encounter with civilians like it's a life-and-death struggle because they have one of the most dangerous jobs, yet the truth is they have about an order of magnitude fewer workplace fatalities than roofers and loggers.
This is despite the fact that police regularly escalate their encounters, making them more dangerous for everyone, police included.
Maybe loggers need to start doing their jobs with miniguns like that scene in Predator.
> So it’s funny
They didn’t say it’s funny.
If you have something meaningful to say, then say it. Don’t twist someone else’s words instead.
> human error
Choosing to train police to act with an “warrior mindset” instead of training for de-escalation seems like it could be classified as human error, too.
I think intentionally and willingly doing something whilst informed of the consequence doesn't count as human error. At least not in this context.
Though it would make more sense, since these humans are likely largely erroneous.
I agree. It’s actually systemic error.
Tens of thousands of no-knock raids every year in the us is crazy stuff. In the early 80s the number was ~1500/year. More than an order of magnitude increase in no knock raids while violent crime has fallen.
> It's a country with a lot of guns. Police do regularly get shot at when raiding.
Call me naive, but I think this could be solved by stricter gun laws. Yes, bad guys might have guns, but that's the case everywhere around the world.
But being afraid that everybody could have a gun and use it against you while doing your work must clearly change something in your behaviour as a police officer... Why not calm down the whole situation by reducing the number of guns then...
You can hardly make stricter gun laws; we have a right to them in this country.
It's hard to limit the guns without infringing on the right of the people.
Maybe that right is not worth the trade off
Unless you change the culture it will be just like the drug war. Firearms familiarity and possession are a cultural rite of passage for ~most males in the USA and there is no way to regulate that in a way that meaningfully stops it short of perhaps large-scale death penalty.
Pretty much everyone in Europe that wants a gun can have one within a couple weeks, the reason they don't only has a little to do with the law.
To get a gun in Norway i need 6 months in a shooting sports club. And then can only take the gun with me for shooting exercise. Strictly prohibited to have a round chambered when not standing on the shooting lane. And then only after an order from the guy running the training.
Most people, including myself, have no interest in jumping through such hoops to exercise a constitutionally protected right. We also value the ability to carry (mostly) anywhere we see fit for the purpose of defending ourselves in a worst case scenario.
Again, a bit naive, but that actually sounds okay to me. You'll learn to use the gun responsibly and in a controlled manner. What else would you want to do with it and why?
Sure, but I could print a reliable firearm with ECM'd barrel and make ammunition within a couple weeks if I went to Norway and so could most of your citizens, just following FGC-9 and "but what about ammo" instruction guides. The law says 6 months but in practice that's not the limiting factor. And then with no problem chamber a round and walk around with it in a backpack. The same applies in most of EU; of course in someplace like France or Poland you can straight up buy a black powder revolver over the counter which although heavy works quite well for most self defense cases with a firearm.
The fact is if any particular Norwegian decides today they want a gun, criminal record or not, and they have very modest means by Norwegian standards they will have it within a few weeks, no problem at all. Of course in USA criminal have been found many times with these self-made guns, now quite reliable and accurate, but a great deal of culture here is people will bear arms no matter the prison sentence hanging over their head or what the law says, and that is the cultural issue you will run into trying to curb gun possession in America. The fact Norwegians don't I think has more to do is that they don't view gun's as integrally to their natural rights and cultural imperative as much as Americans do, the physical potentiality is there for them to bear arms roughly widely as Americans do even without a change to law.
But not all States' gun laws are equally strict? So if the state with the stricted gun laws is acting in a constitutional manner then other states could also implement those laws but choose not to.
So a lot of this stuff is truly self inflicted and the result of poor policy choices -- not because of governments reluctantly but dutifully obeying the 2nd amendment.
> Yes, bad guys might have guns, but that's the case everywhere around the world.
The number of guns in the hands of bad guys caries drastically around the world.
You can’t reduce this to “it’s the same everywhere” because it’s not.
True!
What I meant is that I think German police, for example, are probably less worried that a traffic stop is likely to get them killed or have them escalate a situation to the use of lethal force.
I think this might be different in the US because guns are just much more common there.
I think that's true but it's not guns alone it's broadly cultural in nature. Different places are different. Even in the US there are vast differences between regions.
I think “culture change” is what is ultimately proposed here.
That's like observing that we could probably solve the issue of people saying mean things on the internet by requiring ID to access it. You have to consider any expected negative consequences as well as if you'd be violating any rights.
Youre aware that the rest of the planet have stricter gun laws and the American problems are fairly unique?
This is even after controlling for things that exacerbate crime like high economic inequality.
For instance, Brazil [1] (a much poorer and more unequal country than the USA) has lower murder rate than a lot of cities now than the USA. The murder rate of Rio seems to be about on the level of Houston (17/100k), or about a third of Detroit (47).
But Rio clearly has __a lot more crime__ than Houston. It's palpable when you're in either city. Even with the Favelas and heavily armed gangs, the murder rate is comparatively low because *normal people dont have guns at nearly the same rate*.
And it shouldn't take a leap of faith to figure out that higher gun ownership leads to more deaths. Guns are the one tool we have intentionally made to cause death.
1. I'm aware that Brazil has a higher murder rate, but comparing cities is a better pick. The northeast of Brazil is in another league than anywhere in the USA in economic conditions; it's not comparable. The only city I can think of with USA levels of economic development would be Florianopolis (murder rate 7/100k) or maybe Balneario Camboriu, or some parts of Sao Paulo like Vila Olimpia.
Places like New Hampshire have the lowest murder rates in USA but yet the loosest gun laws (New Hampshire has nearly European homicide rates but also a very European ethnicity type demographic). The murder rates in USA are tied way closer to where black people are than what the gun law is with the notable exception of New Mexico.
And before someone rages... look for yourself:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9e/Af...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/83/Ho...
We’ve seen other highly developed countries operate just fine without arming their citizenry to the teeth.
We've also seen it go wrong plenty of times. They can do them and we can do us I figure; I'm quite happy with my gun rights thanks.
There are highly developed countries that tightly regulate speech and network access relative to most of the west. Does that mean adopting an ID requirement to post on Twitter coupled with anti hate speech laws would be an obviously good thing?
If tweets were a leading cause of death in children we should probably at least consider making it harder to tweet.
It was an arbitrary example. Try to see past the politically charged topic to the actual analogy that I'm attempting to make.
The point of my original reply wasn't about the position being expressed but rather the stated reasoning. If your logic amounts to "Y could solve X therefore we should be doing Y" notice that when applied to other things that line of reasoning doesn't seem to hold up very well.
If you want to have a discussion about child mortality versus tail risks such as elections being suspended or the government murdering protesters a la Iran that's fine but please realize that wasn't the point of my earlier reply.
I don’t know if there is any precedent from taking away hundreds of millions of guns from an armed country actually
Australia de-armed pretty successfully.
Australia has more guns now, and more guns per capita, than it did at the time it almost unified all gun laws.
It didn't "de-arm" - it brought all states and territories into near alignment on gun regulation.
If you're interested I can link to good footage of my actual IRL neighbour shooting 24x24 inch targets at 5,000 yards, here in Australia.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7owwTz7Z0OE
Alternatively you might be interested in Australian footage of feral control, taking down 800 oversized wild pigs in 4 hours from a helicopter.
> We’ve seen other highly developed countries operate just fine without arming their citizenry to the teeth.
Good for them. As an American, I'm quite happy with our Second Amendment rights, I'm not looking to roll that back in the slightest. And if anything, with the recent rise of the fascist authoritarian regime that we've seen, I'd think that maybe a whole lot of "anti gun" people here would be well on their way to becoming "formerly anti gun" people.
All my life I've heard that an armed populace is to protect us from authoritarian government. Now that we have creeping authoritarians running the country, where are all of those "second amendment solution" people? What trigger are they waiting for, exactly?
Realistically, it's more to protect from unhinged supporters of the current regime than the regime itself.
Recall that this authoritarian won the popular vote ~18 months ago.
The protection is against a minority authoritarian government. If half the populace supports the guy in charge then taking up arms is effectively a declaration of civil war. That's a case of the cure being worse than the affliction.
Fast forward a year or so, suppose popularity has hit single or low double digits, imagine a blatant attempt at subverting the election process, that's where an armed populace comes in.
> What trigger are they waiting for, exactly?
Critical mass.
Look, I could pick up a rifle tomorrow, and march on DC by myself with the intention of toppling the fascist regime. And what would result? I'd be quickly arrested or killed and nothing would change. So what's the point?
But if I was part of a group of 1,000,000 like-minded people, then I might still be arrested or killed, but at least there's a much higher likelihood that some actual change would take place.
Now, as a lifelong believer in the "an armed populace is to protect us from authoritarian government" mindset myself, I have to say, I am extremely disappointed in a lot of people right now. People that I grew up with, that I've always trusted, respected, and maybe even admired. Because while fascism metastasizes and spreads through our country nearly completely unchecked, they all seem unwilling to even speak up against what's going on. And I can't defend their choices, but I can say that I still believe that there is a tipping point, some event, or sequence of events, that would kick things into into gear if needed[1].
[1]: I say "if needed" because it's not 100% clear to me that the only possible way out of this mess is an armed uprising. We might still be able to "vote our way out of this" and the optimistic take is that many Americans are sitting on their hands as long as they hold a shred of hope that that is still possible.
The more pessimistic take is that a majority of the "second amendment to protect us from authoritarianism" crowd are hypocritical ass-clowns, who are actually OK with authoritarianism as long as "their guy" is the one in power. :-(
But you won't get that critical mass without a spark.
People need to see action and see it work without repercussions to the actor.
People will take notice when someone like Thiel, Bannon, or Miller are taken down with a drone and the drone operator escapes arrest.
They'll think to themselves "Wait a minute, if someone can take out a billionaire I can take out that cop who raped my cousin and got a paid vacation as punishment for it."
What comes after that is anybody's guess but I predict an impending moment where individual citizens realize that they're not as helpless as they have been lead to believe and that technology can help them eliminate long-standing criminals operating in positions of power with immunity in theiry local communities.
They either voted for the authoritarian or they don't care as long as the authoritarian doesn't touch their guns. Womp womp.
Can you tell me more?
As an individual person, having right to bear guns doesn't seem to have any impact or saving powers against the authoritarian regime. What scenarios relating to authoritarian regimes (be specific) do you find having a gun at home would help with?
> As an individual person, having right to bear guns doesn't seem to have any impact or saving powers against the authoritarian regime.
See my reply above. But loosely speaking, you are correct when looking at things from a purely individual point of view. No one of us is going to topple an authoritarian regime by ourselves. But I don't think that was ever the point. It's an assemblage of large numbers of like-minded armed individuals who can effect change.
And just to be clear... I'm a peaceful person at heart (but not a pacifist). I don't want blood-shed, and I don't want to see an armed uprising or a civil war on many levels. But I'd at least like to see many of my fellow #2A advocates being more vocal and visible about stating our displeasure with the current environment, and our willingness in principle to take action if/when it becomes clear that it is necessary. That, ideally, in and of itself reduces the need for actual violence, by acting as a strong deterrent.
Aside from the obvious (being ready and able to form an armed resistance) there's the deterrent. When you know that your populace has certain options available to them that will inform your actions.
You are naive for assuming that the government aren't the bad guys with guns. Just ask the 30,000 Iranian protesters that were slaughtered if you don't believe me.
They should stop "raiding" people's homes.
They don't raid schools when there's someone actively killing children. They can just hold off a bit and get people when they're on the move.
They are supposed to. That was the lesson learned from Columbine.
That is also why the police response in Uvalde is highly criticized.
> Police do regularly get shot at when raiding.
Got any data?
It happens daily? Weekly? Monthly?
What is "regularly"?
Doing quick research says about 1 shot at per day, 1-2 fatalities per week, and about 26,000 assaults per year
That’s total officers shot, not specifically for raids.
A NYT investigation indicated there were “at least 13” officer deaths tied to forced entry raids from 2010-2016, so around 2/year. It’s unclear how many other fatalities happen in no knock raids. Given that there are only 50-60 total fatalities/year it’s surprising there isn’t comprehensive data for this.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/18/us/forced-ent...
There are an estimated 20k-80k no-knock warrants in the US every year for context.
Not a silly question. If you go back to the 2000s, you'll see the growing militarization of local police. This is partially an economic prop-up where the military can now sell police departments materials/arms/etc. and police departments can buy them. Thus the military needs more. Nice little situation they found.
At the same time as these departments getting more funding, it feels like most departments have decided its better to use taxpayer funds to settle court cases rather than train and be more selective.
One of my favourite little details in Jeeves and Wooster is that British cops are shown as bumbling fools who fit right in with the cast.
Meanwhile American police are consistently depicted as trigger happy, shooting at any minor provocation.
There's a reason we had a few years of heavy anti police protest across the US.
It’s disturbing. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I were pulled over and my window and door is closed. If I reach for the door handle will the cop think I’m reaching for gun? Do wait for him to scream at me through the window? How do I keep from things escalating? Is there a place in the US where the cops aren’t totally insane? SF? Santa Barbara? Maybe Marin County?
Yes. Kind of. Anything involving home invasion I’ve usually seen them go in like an occupying force. Including the time i called them because a small group was going around the neighborhood trying to break into houses. They show up with bullet proof vests and assault rifles at the ready and pull everyone out of their houses.
Not many people watch them, but there are countless videos of police stops where it's not the police drawing a gun, but the driver of the car pulled over. Often it's not just pulled- it's aimed and fired. Some cops die, thankfully many get hit in the arm and it's non fatal.
It happens so much in the United States that you honestly can't blame the vast majority of at least being ready. That's not saying there aren't cops that are TOO ready and unclip the holster just walking up to the car.
Let me outline how broken policing is an institution in the US:
1. Cops are generally stupid and untrained. You just had to watch them testify in the Afroman trial and you might think "geez these guys aren't the brightest bulbs". No, theyre not. But they are also the most average cops;
2. Cops are corrupt. They steal things all the time. "We miscounted the money". Yeah, right. You got got caught stealing;
3. Cops lie all the time. They'll lie on the stand. This happens so often there's a term for it: testilying [1];
4. Cops never go after other cops. In fact, you're generally punished or even killed for going after other cops. It's career suicide;
5. If, somehow, you get charged with a crime, you as a cop have rights the rest of us can only dream about. You're not allowed to interview the suspect for 24 hours. Their union rep must be there and so on. Enough time to get their story straight. Why don't we all have those same rights?
6. Cops aren't trained to de-escalate. They're only trained to escalate, lethally. Cops kill over 1000 people a year [2]. A pretty famous example is the murder of Sonya Massey [3]. Sonya was lethally shot for being near a pot of boiling water. This case was also quite rare because somebody went to jail;
7. Some departments go so far to essentially be gangs. One of the most famous examples is the LA Sheriff's Department [4];
8. Should a prosecutor actually go after a cop, it's typically career suicide. Prosecutors live and die by conviction stats. It's how they get promoted and seek judgeships and higher office. Why? Because for there other cases, their cop witnesses will start missing court dates or even changing their testimony so your cases get dismissed or found not guilty.
A lot of TV is what's called "copaganda". It typically paints police as competent, not corrupt, honorable and not at all the job most likely to commit domestic violence [5].
One exception to this is The Wire, which is a portrayal of institutional failure at virtually every level of American society. For bonus points, We Built This City [6].
It's a much deeper topic why it is this way but unsurprisingly the answer can be overly reduced to "racism" eg the origins of American law enforcement are in slave-catching.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_perjury
[2]: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/policekillings_total.htm...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Sonya_Massey
[4]: https://knock-la.com/tradition-of-violence-lasd-gang-history...
[5]: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/1862/
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Built_This_City
I'm not saying what they did was correct, but they were allegedly told that he had a drug operation and a kidnapping dungeon.
which is fine. But they didn't vet this info, just ran with it. Massive negligence & duty failure
A judge reviewed the evidence and signed the warrant. It's not like the cops just took what the witness said and ran with it.
In Europe there's a maybe 0.1% chance that any random adult is carrying a firearm. And the vast majority of those are going to be rifles for hunting. In the US, it's more like a 3% chance. And firearms in the US tend to have higher capacity and higher rates of fire. Hence the default militaristic response from law enforcement. Or at least that's one of several reasons.
Considering this was a no-knock warrant, one of the probably causes being kidnapping (shady & possibly corrupt warrant in itself) where they broke down the doors, I'd say they expected some sort of gang activity or something.
A big part of being police is the cosplay of being in the army. Why do you think airsoft is so popular?
When you break into someone's home you want to be ready for people with guns shooting at you.
Politely giving them a few seconds of free shooting before you draw your guns is not a great survival strategy.
If you break in with little to no notice or with a lack of manpower or if the occupant has nothing to lose, sure. This is why no knock raids are incredibly dangerous for all involved and generally a terrible practice.
With the number of officers they often have in most cases it would make more sense to start off slowly and unarmed, making an earnest attempt to communicate with the target. People won't usually choose to fight a suicidal battle. Even if they're extremely upset and disagreeable almost everyone will go along with it if calmly presented with a warrant and given some time to think things through.
and I would argue no knock is unconstitutional, the whole point of a warrant is to prove you’re allowed to search me and the law was written in a time where everything was on paper, we’re suppose to be secure in our papers short of a warrant, if you can’t show a warrant how do I know I’m not being robbed and need to defend myself? it’s totally bonkers
If you're there to arrest people, that seems reasonable. But if the goal is to collect evidence, you can't give them time to destroy it.
I do have the presumption that when professionals do things that seem weird, they probably have reasons that I as an amateur don't immediately understand.
I've also read enough Radley Balko to know cops often get away with doing awful and stupid things...
> But if the goal is to collect evidence, you can't give them time to destroy it.
Unless it's proven someone is on imminent harm, then they should find another way to collect evidence, or just not do it.
I'm aware, but there seem to be an awful lot of instances where "high stakes high priority evidence collection" doesn't apply.
> When you break into someone's home…
So we're starting right off the bat with the false premise that this is the only approach cops can take in these scenarios.
Best to kill anything that moves; it's the only way to survive.
The department would actually prefer that to a scenario where someone is left alive to sue them for raiding 86 1st St when the unreliable informant said 96.
Dead men can’t sue!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oponIfu5L3Y
This is the video in question, police again falling trap to the Streisand effect.
Also probably a rare case where there are a few Streisand effect's all packed together, where the cops at each step made it worse for themselves.
If they never did the raid in the first place, no music video, no "embarrassment". They could have cut their losses, and not made a big deal about it and probably way less people (including myself) would have ever heard about it.
Instead they decided to sue, which made even bigger news. Here they could again have chosen "You know what, maybe this is counter-productive, lets settle/cancel it", and again probably people would have cared way less about it.
Instead, they go to court, make a bunch of exaggerated and outrageous claims, one officer apparently cried as well, all in a public court room that is being recorded, again making it a bigger thing.
Finally, Afroman wins the case, leading to this now seemingly making international news, and the videos continue racking up views.
I know cops aren't known for being smart, but I have to wonder who made them act like this, don't cops have lawyers who can inform them about what is a smart move vs not? Seems they almost purposefully and intentionally tried to help Afroman, since they basically made the "wrong move" at every chance they got.
I suspect it was less about the legal merits and more about punishing (whether or not they won) through the lawsuit itself.
Of course. Questioning their authority is a status challenge, and they're accustomed to having their status go unchallenged. Hence, punitive punishment.
One of many aspects of improving law enforcement would be pointedly training out and averting any perception of being "above" people. "Public servant" is a phrase for a reason.
Yea it’s as simple and stupid as that. This (black) peasant isn’t respecting our authority and higher status. If we let one slide then everyone is going to think we are equal to them. In their logic, they have to fight in court.
This is a common archetype when people get challenged (escalation of commitment), they effectively double down. I don't necessarily think it was racially motivated (but also don't doubt that it could have been).
> don't necessarily think it was racially motivated
Growing up Adams county myself, I'll go ahead and be the one to tell you that it was absolutely racially motivated. You do not want to be a minority out there. Hell, you don't want to be perceived as being left leaning at all out there. This is the same area where a ~15 year old girl was assaulted on camera, in front of a police officer for participating in a protest (IIRC, BLM, but I could be wrong). This made the front page of reddit when it happeend.
And this is very likely, corruption motivated as well. I have enough family and friends left out there who have first hand experience with the politics and policing of the area to know. In fact, I have a late friend who had this exact thing happen (though, one county over), on video and everything. He's just not a D list celebrity with money, so nobody cared.
If someone wrote a documentary about this area and tried to pass it off as fiction, people wouldn't believe it, as it would be considered too absurd to be believable.
American institutions were set-up prima facie to be racially-motivated. Explicit references have been removed, but a lot of the structural elements that supported those explicit references remain. I know many people recoil at the idea, because it seems like an affront to their personal self-image and the national ethos (or at least its marketing), but I generally hold that if an institution acts in a way that's consistent with historically-aligned racial prejudice, it's actually on the institution to show that it wasn't a racially-motivated outcome, not the other way around.
And there is some evidence that the institutions themselves recognize this (or they did, until we elected an openly-corrupt white supremacist to the highest office): https://www.pillsburylaw.com/en/news-and-insights/us-doj-res...
There’s a name for that, SLAPP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...
Many states in the US have laws to try to limit them by making them easier to dismiss etc.
Yeah, the only reason I'm not quite sure SLAPP is right is that he's a fairly prominent and well-off figure and they're a pretty small department. So I guess it's an attempted SLAPP suit, but they aimed too high (poor aim not being unfamiliar to cops).
Cops only know how to do one thing: escalate the situation.
Even when it doesn't make sense too. Like suing afroman. Like shooting blindly through a house like they did when they killed Breonna Taylor. Like the time they shot Charles Kinsey who was laying on the ground with his hands in the air. Like the deadly game of Simon Says they like to play. Like any of the millions of examples where they shoot someone who was submitting and defenseless.
Millions?
That's... A very big number.
Counting from the dawns of the various police forces in the country maybe? Impossible to know, but even then...
Hyperbole illustrates the point pretty well though
That was what I was thinking at first too, but if I was sitting on their side, my mind would still go for "Wait, if we sue him, won't this make the news and make things better for him?" immediately, rather than "Yeah, this will suck for him". I'm not sure how they thought this would be bad for him, legal costs?
You're assuming a rational, reasoned process, rather than an instinctive punishment of a perceived status challenge.
When you observe someone acting in a way that seems obviously against their self-interest, it is always worth considering the possibility that there's some interest you don't understand...but it's also worth considering the possibility that they're doing a bad job of considering their own interests.
This is an event that took course over 3 years! I could understand the initial actions, statements and whatnot from the department to maybe be instinctual and emotional reaction to events/messages, but during these 3 years, at least one of them must have had some still time to reflect on what they're doing.
It's very easy to double down and reinforce your own past thinking rather than re-examining it. It's also very easy to "play a role", even as consequences play out; "reasoning" like "I will do X, then they will do Y which I don't want", rather than stepping back and thinking "if I do X, Y is likely to happen, I don't want Y to happen, so what should I do differently".
They assumed they were going to win, and thus enact punishment for questioning their authority.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them have already spent money in anticipation of a favorable judgement. Cops are largely immune from facing negative consequences so it was probably an incredible shock to lose.
They thought they were going to get a payday at the end. That tells you how d much they actually cared about their privacy/the privacy of their families, they were willing to sell it for a couple hundred thousand dollars.
This is a key insight.
Most "rational actor" theories of human behavior actually only work in the large (where the average can dominate outlier behavior) and in systems where rational action is a positive feedback loop ("a fool and his money are soon parted").
If those assumptions break down (especially the second, i.e. if foolish use of money results in more money accruing, not less), what we perceive as rational behavior should not be expected.
Billed to the public, too.
Adams County paid for their civil suit???
"The process is the punishment"
This may be true in many cases.
In this case however the story currently is two times(!) on the front page of haackernews (which isn't a music celebrity gossip site), bringing a musician into spotlight who's career was far from its peak. Hardly any better Marketing campaign one could imagine.
If the police possessed the self-control and critical thinking to not drag this whole thing into a lawsuit, I think the raid would likely have never happened in the first place.
I suspect that either this was some confidential informant who just reported false claims about Afroman and the police used it to get a warrant. Or the whole department is just corrupt and make up stuff to get a warrant in order to raid his house hoping to forfeiture his money.
They would have individually gotten lots of money in compensation if they would have won. So maybe the motives on their side are a bit more materialistic.
> I know cops aren't known for being smart
Not only aren't they known for being smart, but they're known for explicitly filtering out smart people.
The 2nd court of appeals ruled in favor of a city (New London, Connecticut) which rejects police applicants for having too high a score on intelligence tests.
See: https://abcnews.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story...
See: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/too-smart-to-be-a-cop/
In my view it's because the city or locality which those cops protect has been remiss, the community has been remiss in making sure that their police actually police in the way that the community wants them to police.
So obviously the community is getting exactly what it deserves by having its police force be legally liable for incompetent malfeasance behavior. Ultimately it will cost the community, Afroman himself, in tax used to fund the police, And then route that money back to afroman and his attorney for his legal fees.
An embarrassment. Humiliation of the community. Reinforcement and debasement of the community. Suppressed business attractiveness of the community for its plain lack of oversight.
I'm not saying that the public has no control over the police, but it does often feel like that.
US Police are trained such that their first impression in any situation is to see how people are reacting to their authority, and if it's not acquiesced to go on high alert.
It's not that they couldn't understand; It's that it's a faux pas to question this way of thinking so nobody does.
Play that out long enough and you get clown shows like these.
> don't cops have lawyers who can inform them about what is a smart move vs not?
Generally, municipalities have at least some sort of attorney on retainer for this sort of thing.
Generally. I don't know if that's the case where he lives.
Either way, the police have to be smart enough to listen to that attorney, and have to be given a consequence for not doing so. If you can brush off everything as qualified immunity and say you were acting under color of law while a part of a union that would raise absolute hell for any sort of corrective action taken against you, you might not be introduced to said consequence.
I have no evidence besides my own experience, but I think that the "back the blue" mentality might skew their support staff's objectivity a bit. Especially in smaller cities and towns where cops aren't just law enforcement, they are foundational pillars of morality and governance. The point I hope I'm making is that they are getting bad advice not because they are stupid, or the people around them are, but rather because it's inevitable due to complex social and psychological reasons.
> The point I hope I'm making is that they are getting bad advice not because they are stupid, or the people around them are, but rather because it's inevitable due to complex social and psychological reasons.
Which basically boils down to when the men with the guns and the violence (or their string pullers) set down a dumb path nobody is going to say "that's fucking stupid, you're stupid, good luck with that". It's gonna be a bunch of tepid "well the odds are long but here's how you could prevail" type criticism that lets them think their path of action is fine right up until it hits reality.
This. The cops don't care if they "look bad" because looking bad doesn't cost them anything. They don't lose any money. The populace is no more entitled to resist them so their jobs are no harder, their KPIs are not imperiled. Etc. etc. At best the municipality will scold them because the municipality cares very little, but not zero about police optics because it impacts their ability to do things that are unpopular.
This has curbed somewhat in small cities because of the insurance industry. Turns out that small towns need insurance to cover police malpractice, and those insurers don't like high-risk or overly aggressive police tactics. Turns out the police can be reasonable, if only they are even slightly accountable.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/20...
AIUI they sued him in their personal capacities, not as the police department. Any taxpayer funded lawyer to defend the PD from such a thing would presumably not be authorized to work a civil suit for a person who happened to be employed by his client.
I had never even heard of Afroman until 3 days ago when I saw some lawyers livestream the trial on YouTube. The whole thing seemed so bizarre and I was surprised why the case wasn't even summary dismissed by the judge in the first place.
Now Afroman has even more material to make YouTube videos of and humiliate these cops for eternity.
>I know cops aren't known for being smart
Even worse. Police departments can actively reject you for being smart.
https://abcnews.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story...
(granted this is a one off case, but it is astonishing and speaks to the larger issue)
Tin foil hat version is that they’re looking for a payday where they can and if this didn’t work they can always check whether the police department failed them as an employer.
Mega-streisand effect ... they stacked together so many of em
I hope they appeal this case just to stack together one more humiliation.
I hope he makes another song with additional material from the court case.
His instagram has daily updates from the court case.
> Also probably a rare case where there are a few Streisand effect's all packed together, where the cops at each step made it worse for themselves.
It is not even that rare; some cases covered by Audit the Audit or Lackluster (same guy), or the civil lawyer. The amount of incompetence among many cops is surprising. They really literally don't even know the law or constitution. Just about anyone is hired. Quality standards are mega-low.
If I were in a gang such that I routinely committed theft and violence without consequence from the government, I'd probably have internalized that I am superior to the plebs. So I would expect what is obviously SLAPP to actually come out in my favor.
> way less people (including myself) would have never heard about it
I think the never here is a typo.
Thanks, `(subs "never" 1)` been applied now!
Yes, but not limited to just that one. https://www.youtube.com/@ogafroman/videos
He also has other videos where he calls one of them a pedofile, questioning their gender (Licc'm low lisa) and more.
> pedofile
apparently, the deputy in question has a brother who was a deputy as well but was fired and charged with a sexual misdemeanor against minors.
Afroman also said he steals money during traffic stops and he was accused of that multiple times.
Of course that's not bulletproof evidence but a reasonable person might assume these rumours are not completely unfounded
EDIT: also the deputy of course didn't steal the money. He miscounted - when seizing the money he put 4630$ in the envelope but wrote 5000$ on it (which is the amount Afroman thought he had there)
> but a reasonable person might assume these rumours to be true
From all the claims Afroman made, it seems the cop sued because of the whole "He claimed he had sex with my wife, which reflects poorly on me", presumably because he only has a chance to win the suit if there is actual lies. The same video seems to have texts about how he crashed into civilians, stealing pills/money and more, but none of that was brought up in the suit, only the cheating part.
Although funnily enough, when one of the questioned about if his wife had an affair with afroman he was like "I dunno". If he doesn't know it's a lie, kinda defeats the point of the defamation suit
We are, of course, not privy to the jury's reasoning unless they choose to divulge it.
Which is unfortunate, because we may never know if they concluded "Given who you've demonstrated yourself to be, your wife is justified in seeking other lovers whether or not this allegation is true" or if there were other factors involved.
I thought it was big time defamation risk for Afroman to call him a pedofile.. but maybe the cop is afraid of discovery in this case..
"Of course?"
Where is that coming from?
Do you seriously not believe (well, know) that sadly, many cops do this ALL THE TIME?
This all feels extremely mild next to what these people did to Afroman.
I think you're confusing gender and sexual orientation. He's calling her a lesbian
No, I'm not. He also posted about her deep voice and people should check what genitals she really has.
So, in the music video, the cops pretty clearly steal something (probably money, as alleged), and attempt to destroy evidence.
They’re facing charges too, right?
Right?
Yes and as a result they will give taxpayer money in a deal and, officer will be moved to nearby county.
Or just promoted. https://www.13abc.com/2026/03/18/toledo-police-promote-lieut...
No, no way they could have known stealing money and destroying evidence is illegal. So the Post-It note on the old court case gives them qualified (absolute) immunity.
here appears to be his celebration of his victory, pretty catchy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM8Ee6pcXvQ
> here appears to be his celebration of his victory
No, that video seems to be from 4 days ago, the verdict of the jury came yesterday.
even more amazing then
Almost too good to be true. They didn't find large quantities of weed, and afroman had cameras set up and caught it on camera. I mean, talk about landing with your bum in the butter. His career just caught a major reboot.
This might be peak Streisand effect.
It gives me immeasurable delight seeing afroman at the top of HN.
Love me some freedom, sweet soulful music, and pie in the face of bad cops.
Dang/Tom, please don't downrank this. America needs this win.
I think this all started with cake in the face of a cop not pie!
Lemon pound cake you say?
I love the Afroman story so much. Everything about it.
It does more to expose just how incompetent, entitled and corrupt the average cop really is, something I wish was better known. The cops who brought this suit are basically the biggest crybabies, are too dumb to realize it and too entitled to realize that others wouldn't see it that way. It's fantastic.
Compare this to policing in Japan [1]:
> Koban cops go to extraordinary lengths to learn their beats. They're required to regularly visit every business and household in their districts twice a year, ostensibly to hand out anti-crime flyers or ask about their security cameras. The owner of a coffee shop told Craft, "With Officer Sota, we can say what's on our mind. He's really like a neighbor. Instead of dialing emergency when we need help, we just call him."
American cops are a gang, by and large.
Cops have absolutely massive budgets, from small towns to big cities. Let's not forget Uvalde, where the police department budget was ~40% of the city budget and it resulted in 19 cops standing outside scared while one shooter kept shooting literal children for an hour. Because they were scared.
[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/walking-the-beat-in-japan-a-hea...
> Let's not forget Uvalde, where the police department budget was ~40% of the city budget and it resulted in 19 cops standing outside scared while one shooter kept shooting literal children for an hour. Because they were scared.
Not only did they not stop the shooter, but they actively prevented parents—who were willing to risk their lives—from intervening. They didn't just not help, they proactively ran interference for the shooter.
I wasn't gonna run from the cops...
Unfortunately Afroman is not particularly pro-freedom (big MAGA supporter). He seems to support certain rights for himself and not for others.
Even if this were true, are we really so far gone in the political discourse that we can't appreciate a win as Americans because of the perceived political orientation of the recipient?
I think the answer is yes, but I still naively hold out hope that we can eventually move beyond this.
I can appreciate that this verdict is a win for freedom, while also finding the footnote that Afroman is not pro-freedom quite useful.
Not sure he's "big MAGA" but I assume this is where the idea stems from - https://www.newsweek.com/afroman-explains-his-new-song-hunte...
It is interesting that his treatment is being cast in the light of racial politics rather than persecution of a political dissident.
I see he celebrated anti-ICE protests in some videos on his YouTube channel. Where does his MAGA support you claim come from?
I think he tried to be the Libertarian presidential candidate and made a song about Hunter Biden, so people just assume he's full MAGA and doesn't deserve 1st amendment rights
I mean, both him and Trump have similar approach to opponents or those who wronged them. In this case, the opponents are deeply unsympathetic to most, so it is harder to see.
I do see how someone whose reaction to being wronged is "I fucked his wife doggy style" could be attracted to the Donald Trump personality.
I’m not at all convinced, because that would mean N A S is a Trumper because:
> “When these streets keep callin’, heard it when I was asleep/That Gay Z and C*ck-A-Fella Records wanted beef”
JayZ responded in kind insinuating it back on N A S.
And Drake is also a Trumpist because he told Chris Brown that he fu*ked Chris’s girl.
Tupac also, for some reason:
> ”… You claim to be a player, but I f*cked your wife/We bust on Bad Boys, n*g*as fu*ked for life.”
2Pac in hit-em-up:
> "That's why I fuc*ed your bitch"
Eminem:
> "I f*cked your mother and made her my bitch,"
You know what? Maybe it’s a rapper thing and not an indication of MAGA alignment?
Yes, it's unfortunate that this good thing happened to a person not aligned to my political worldview.
He’s willing to publicly criticize government corruption and child abuse, so there’s no way MAGA would accept him. (Both these stances came up in the defamation lawsuit and in the music video.)
When he ran for president in 2024, he registered as an independent, “citing inflation, the housing market, law enforcement corruption, and legalizing marijuana as key campaign issues”.
Even if he is ultra right wing on secondary issues (I have no idea) those are all anti-MAGA or bipartisan stances.
https://www.hotnewhiphop.com/664027-afroman-2024-presidentia...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroman
The problem isn't finding people who will publicly criticize child abuse and government corruption. The problem is finding people who actually will do something about those specific problems and not find some way to enrich themselves (or their supporters) in their name instead.
> citing inflation, the housing market, law enforcement corruption, and legalizing marijuana as key campaign issues
The first two of those issues were Trump issues in his campaign and Trump rescheduled marijuana to schedule 2.
There was an EO, but that is not law. Cannabis is still schedule I last I checked. The order is to make it schedule III.
A president can not make a law, only sign them into existence. He can also direct enforcement or lessen it.
As far as I understand, the Schedule of Cannabis is written into the US Code. So Congress would need to amend it.
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...
It's under the purview of the executive branch to determine drug scheduling
> The term "list I chemical" means a chemical specified by regulation of the Attorney General ... until otherwise specified by regulation of the Attorney General
Thank you, TIL!
That's good to know. The second sentence you gave was superfluous because the first one told us that -- I add this not to dismiss your efforts but to highlight them.
Pretty funny, worth seeing at least once to be able to reference it at appropriate times.
Having had my house raided, I love this. Police incompetence should be exposed at all opportunities with the hope that it makes some small amount of difference to future competence.
Hoping it wasn't the SWAT guys. Those guys go hard and everyone is a meth terrorist until zip tied on the floor and proven otherwise. They also tend to shoot your dog. =(
Judging by the videos, they look like the typical American "deputy" that wouldn't even pass the fitness tests in other countries, which probably means it's easier to escape, but also that they are more trigger-happy.
Mime was in Australia, so much lower chance of violence, more polite.
The incompetence was:
1. The entire suspicion was based on an IP address
2. They did no background investigation for potential counter evidence - they didn't even know to expect children in the house (school aged children that have been attending public school for at least 5 years each at that point).
3. As a result of the above, one of my kids was somewhat traumatised by being woken up with a police officer in her room
7 cops. They called in two more because I had so much computer hardware, so 9 cops altogether for an entire morning.
8 months later I get told I can pick up my (~$10k worth of) gear that they took. No case to answer.
Should never have made it to a warrant. Useless, lazy, waste of a lot of resources. And creates an entire extended family with significantly diminished respect for, and increased suspicion of, the police force as a whole...
... you know, that whole erosion of trust in the system that's playing out writ large right now.
Going on the stand and stating that you "don't know" whether the allegedly defamatory statements you are suing over are true or not is a... bold legal strategy.
Or claiming you don't know what crime your brother was charged with that led him to resign from the same police department.
The ACLU called it a SLAPP lawsuit. If true, they probably didn't care if they won or not.
That said, going on stand when your opponent has proven they can and will use your words and actions against you in the court of public opinion is a... bold strategy.
Honestly it was pretty ballsy of Afroman to release songs during the trial (which did come up, but I think they sort of ignored due to some law that changed in 2024?)
>Going on the stand and stating that you "don't know" whether the allegedly defamatory statements you are suing over are true or not is a... bold legal strategy.
if the statement is true, that's a defense against defamation.
if the statement is not believable, that is also a defense against defamation.
it actually was legal strategy designed to dance around the legal strategy behind those questions being asked, taking the air out of your insult
I think comment was alleging perjury.
They do know the statement is true (and this is provable). Pretending like they "don't know" is a lie under oath.
Are you saying you believe the cop who said, under oath, he "doesn't know" whether his wife could be having an affair with afroman chose to do that as part of a deliberate legal strategy? And that you think this casts him in a more positive light than merely being clueless?
Those cops embarrassed themselves. Especially that one lady that was faux crying. Shameful behavior from the largest gang in the US.
That didn't seem like faux crying. Making fun of her in that way is the hardest to defend IMO, since it had nothing to do with her job performance or relevant character attributes. (E.g. how the other officer had been accused of stealing before, or had a brother resign from the force after being charged with a crime involving a minor).
That said, I don't disagree with outcome.
Aren't cops by default public figures? They're the de facto face of the police for the ordinary citizen, not sure they should be the type of individual who cries because someone calls them fat, lesbian or whatever. These people have the legal right to essentially execute you in public, I think we should set the bar a bit higher on who should be allowed to be a police officer in the first place.
I was raised by LEOs. My mother and all four of her husbands were career long LEOs in the South.
Of course this is just based on my anecdotes, but LEOs have some of the thinnest skin imaginable. The first time I fought a grown man was when I was 13 and I had to fight my mother's fourth husband. He was a Deputy Sheriff and combat veteran and that dude had the emotional strength of a 12 year old girl who didn't get asked to the winter dance.
It seems the job selects for those types. I suppose people interested in law enforcement / justice that aren't that way either end up as lawyers or working for the FBI or something.
If you don't have any kind of marketable skills yet want to make a decent living with plenty of benefits, becoming a LEO is the easiest choice for most people.
Or if you don't have any marketable skills yet have a spouse that has a job with health benefits, you can become a real estate agent.
Those two career paths seem to be the most chosen for almost all of the 'not so bright' folks I grew up with.
Other way around, right? Those types select that job. You're weak but you want to appear powerful, so...
It's a use it or lose it skill. When you carry a badge and gun around and can bark orders at people all day and they have to comply or face the infinite violence you can summon with your radio your skin will grow thin over time.
Power corrupts, or some half baked version of that.
This is a career that quite literally selects for "not too smart" [1]
1 - https://www.wirthlawoffice.com/tulsa-attorney-blog/2013/07/c...
These people carry guns and can kill you on the street and they can't take getting called some bad names?
Yes, exactly. Try calling a cop a “pig” to their face. Or breaking up with a cop. Or just say no to something they’re asking you to do.
“Not all cops” and all that, but enough of them are like that that you have to be really careful how you engage with them.
> Try calling a cop a “pig” to their face.
At least where I live in Europe you aren't allowed to insult people and you can get fined for it. Be it a police officer or a any other person.
I cannot imagine living in a place where I can't tell someone what I think of them once in a while.
You can tell them they are doing a shameful job or that you disagree with their actions or whatever.
You just can't _insult_ them like a 6 year old on a playground. Why is the ability to do so valuable to you?
The first thing you described is an insult.
No, an insult implies insolence, rudeness, condescension, insensitivity. You can communicate a dim view of someone without being rude.
It is viscerally against my cultural upbringing for the government to make illegal a verbal insult, it seems like an incredible overreach. I'm genuinely culture shocked hearing this. I'd be no more shocked hearing that it's illegal to dye one's hair.
being fined != physical, possibly fatal violence with body-cam turned off and irrevocable immunity
I do agree with you and the other comment in this vein. I have very little sympathy for these officers.
However, there are different situations. For example, I imagine this person is not very surprised or upset to be called "dyke" in a verbal altercation. That is different from sitting in a quiet courtroom, knowing it is being filmed, watching a popular video where your gender identity and expression is repeatedly insulted.
Let's say the officer was black, the defendant was white, and made a video with lots of racist stereotypes. Would we think that was funny and cool? Would we be surprised if the black man had a breakdown in the courtroom watching it? We wouldn't even be having this conversation.
By all means, call cops pigs, liars, thieves, idiots. If you want to be racist, sexist, or call them pedophiles, I'll defend your right to do so but not be as sympathetic.
Otherwise we're just the hypocritical liberals as the right wingers accuse...
> say the officer was black, the defendant was white, and made a video with lots of racist stereotypes. Would we think that was funny and cool? Would we be surprised if the black man had a breakdown in the courtroom watching it?
This is very common in the US? Common enough to be a minor plot point in a current cop show (Cross), which is to say the audience will be familiar with the material. Also explored in e.g. True Detective. No, the Black cop does not get to break down in court while being racially taunted. Either on TV or real life. This is expected by all to be a part of doing his job.
So? Even if the officer doesn't live up to our emotionally resilient ideal, it doesn't mean the stereotyped insults are any more acceptable.
And to the genesis of this thread, it doesn't mean I must believe the tears are fake.
I agree with you on the sentiment—I don't think it's cool to use racially charged terms or otherwise in degrading ways. That isn't to say my sympathy is lost. When you feel powerless you reach for power in any way that you can and trying to make someone feel bad for who they are is low-hanging fruit.
The thing I don't understand is why it isn't a felony for the police the disable the surveillance cameras! That alone should be a crime. I get that you need search warrants and protections, but you shouldn't be able to suppress the evidence of your work, since it's common for police to steal, plant evidence, or destroy property.
It is a crime, obviously. Things don't magically become crimes depending on the employer of the perpetrator - that's the whole point of "a nation of laws and not of men."
It's legal for you to arrest someone if you see them commit a felony. It's legal for you to arrest someone under a warrant if you are deputized by a Sheriff of the court (almost never happens, but legal). It's not legal for you, whether you are employed at a police agency or not, to vandalize someone's camera.
> "On March 14, 2023, seven Adams County police officers sued Foreman, alleging that his use of the video of the raid invaded their privacy."
THEIR privacy?!?!? Their privacy ... in his home? This is the most ridiculous claim I have ever heard.
The term I learned for this yesterday is “crybully”.
This is not some footage issue, there apparently was a smear campaign online.
FTFA:
> After making the music video, Foreman allegedly continued putting up social media posts with names of the officers involved, the lawsuit states.
> Several of the posts allegedly falsely claimed that the cops “stole my money” and were “criminals disguised as law enforcement,” according to the suit.
> They also falsely stated that the officers are “white supremacists,” that Officer Brian Newman “used to do hard drugs” before “snitching” on his friends, and that Officer Lisa Phillips is “biologically male,” according to the lawsuit.
> falsely claimed that the cops “stole my money”
That appears to have happened; they're claiming it was a miscount.
> were “criminals disguised as law enforcement,”
Seems fair. (And opinion, which can't be defamation.)
> They also falsely stated that the officers are “white supremacists,”
Statistically that's a pretty sensible assumption.
I'd note that the jury found Afroman not liable on all these.
> They also falsely stated that the officers are “white supremacists,”
> Statistically that's a pretty sensible assumption.
Interesting, is there a source or some data you’re aware of that suggests that it’s a statistically safe assumption?
The American police force originally started as a formalized slave patrol to capture runaway slaves [0]. It's well-documented [1]. We can try to argue whether modern policing carries that tradition, but case [2] after documented case [3] keeps bearing out more of the same. It's been the topic of research [4] and pop culture [5].
[0] https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/3/did-american-pol...
[1] https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/
[2] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rodney-King
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd
[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7331505/
[5] https://genius.com/123154
Pretty clear issues with this line of reasoning.
One, even if all police in the U.S. did start as slave patrols it is a textbook case of a genetic fallacy.
Two, your article discusses several origins of police forces in the US. In Boston it had nothing to do with slaves because Massachusetts was not a slave state when they created a police system in the 1830s. And since Afroman was raided in Ohio, also never a slave state, it does not make sense to carry over southern slave-catching history into modern police culture.
> In Boston it had nothing to do with slaves because Massachusetts was not a slave state when they created a police system in the 1830s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1793
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850
"It required that all escaped slaves, upon capture, be returned to the slave-owner and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate."
Boston's police department was founded in 1854.
> The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838.
This is from your Time.com article.
Second, fugitive slave extradition was controversial in northern states and from your Wikipedia article several northern states even passed legislation to protect fugitive slaves.
And why would northern states spend their own tax dollars to fund police forces to capture slaves? It doesn’t make sense. They created police for public safety reasons in cities.
And even if none of that were true it still does not address the genetic fallacy. Just because some police forces started as slave patrols does not imply that all police today are inherently white supremacist.
> The American police force originally started as a formalized slave patrol to capture runaway slaves
I don't see how this supports the claim
You don't see how an organization founded to enforce a cornerstone of white supremacy may have a statistical likelihood of its members being white supremacists?
No, I don't think that this supports the claim that it's a safe assumption that any given cop is a white supremacist.
I've attempted to take your responses as made in good faith twice now, despite evidence to the contrary in other threads. I understand if this topic is uncomfortable for you, either because it challenges your world view or because it feels personally invalidating. It appears as though you're looking for one very specific statistic or logical vulnerability in what others are sharing to refute the overall claim. However, I can only lead you to water.
Sorry, just looking for evidence that supports the claim that was made. So far there isn’t any.
Not the claim made.
> Statistically that's a pretty sensible assumption.
was the claim, ie. quite likely, tending toward more often than not.
Versus your phrasing that any given cop is
Your post is essential. No one is claiming 100% of cops are white supremacists. One is claiming that it's sensible to assume they are.
If 20% of cops were white supremacists, and I was a minority, it would be sensible to behave as if every encounter had a significant chance of being with someone is looking to ruin my day.
The majority do not need to be unsafe for me to feel unsafe around the community. You have to factor in the potential power they wield (to kill you or take your freedom or seize your assets), combined with the odds that one will do it because they have wrong headed ideas about race.
Is there evidence to support the claim that, more often than not, a given cop is a white supremacist?
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the claim here is "majority of cops are white supremacists". Thats not the claim. The claim is that it is sensible to assume a cop is.
A very different bar. A minority of cops can be white supremacists and because of the power they wield it's still sensible to treat them like every interaction is with a a white supremacist. As an example, a cop can legally kill you in many cases (or deny you freedom or seize your assets). If you had, say, a 20% chance of encountering a cop who was a white supremacist it would be sensible to treat every interaction as if that were the case.
Consider how unevenly weighted the outcomes depending on whether you assume a cop is racist when factoring how sensible it is to assume they are.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-i...
Where in this article does it suggest that it’s a statistically safe assumption that most cops are white supremacists?
It's one data point in a pretty large body of evidence; the FBI thinks they're infiltrating law enforcement in a widespread fashion.
A fascinating study from Stanford looked at police traffic stops nationally around the daylight savings switch (as a natural experimental control) and found pretty hard evidence cops treat black drivers very differently during the day (i.e. when they can see their skin color).
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2020/05/veil-darkness-redu...
Additional aspect of this: "you're a white supremacist" is almost certainly a First Amendment protected statement of opinion that can't be defamatory.
Warnings going back to 2006:
* https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/media/24350/ocr
Behold, the sea lion in its native habitat.
You understand that white supremacist groups existing as cops doesn't make the majority of cops white supremacists, right?
I'd hate to see someone use this kind of bad logic when deciding who is a criminal.
> I'd hate to see someone use this kind of bad logic when deciding who is a criminal.
Oh dear. I have bad news about cops.
Which is, apparently, a strategy you wholly endorse.
People walking around with guns and badges should be held to the highest of standards. Suggesting an equivalence between the burden of proof on a hackernews commenter and individuals authorized by the state to detain, arrest, and potentially deprive citizens of a free country of their life, liberty or property is asinine and shameful.
Cops want the power to do all this, do it incorrectly, be unable to be held accountable, and then cry like babies when someone makes videos and mocks them. He could have just sued them directly to recoup his financial losses from them destroying his house over a bs warrant but cops have qualified immunity. The justice system gives him no recourse. They sued him for videos meanwhile his countersuit was thrown out on this basis.
If you support the cops on this I see no reason why one should not conclude you "wholly endorse" the ongoing "law enforcement" assault on free Americans. What principles do you take the nation to be founded on? You realize red coats coming into people's homes under the color of the law is what instigated the war that bought this country its liberty 250 years ago? I fail to see how this is much different, armed goons with guns and badges invading private property that cannot be held accountable. No election he can take part in will reasonably solve this so he can sue in a timely manner, as the unelected justice system has unilaterally decided you cannot sue cops over this. This is anti-American. Go read the bill of rights and tell me it is consistent with the spirit of those hard fought liberties to support the cops on this. I hope if you actually endorse burdens of proof you will at least support local, state and federal representatives who will codify into law a "repeal" of qualified immunity so that cops who fail to meet that burden can be held personally accountable.
Note a case on that count would still need to prevail on the merits. That is how justice is supposed to work. Instead a carve out for law enforcement has been created where you can't even take them to court. Your case is going to get thrown out. The justice system should not be creating this special class of people, with great power and depriving them of the responsibilities common between neighbors in a free society. What they have done is really not unlike the British sending armed men into American cities to violate rights and then insisting they cannot be held accountable in colonial courts as a matter of principle. This is criminal. People should be able to sue police officers. If that makes the cost of waving guns in people's faces more expensive then so be it.
> People walking around with guns and badges should be held to the highest of standards. Suggesting an equivalence between the burden of proof on a hackernews commenter and individuals authorized by the state
Let's take a step back. OP, essentially, made a very basic logical error (actually not an error IMO, but a willfully misleading statement).
They said, "Statistically, [assuming a cop is a white supremacist] a pretty sensible assumption."
In my mind, what makes something a statistically safe assumption would mean that, more times than not, you'd be right. So it'd mean that greater than half of police are white supremacists. They then posted a link to support that statement which said that some white supremacist groups are instructing their members to join the police force. He's gone from the evidence of "some" white supremacist groups are telling "some" of their members among the police force to justify saying that it's a safe assumption to assume any officer is a white supremacist (greater than 50% chance for any random cop to be a white supremacist).
Considering that I strongly doubt the quantity of white supremacists that are members of white supremacist organizations in this county is even more than half of the amount of police officers, I very much doubt that the subset of individuals in the subset of organizations who were given this instruction and actually followed through on it comprises more than half of the police officers in the country.
To which I facetious said, "I'd hate to see someone use this kind of bad logic when deciding who is a criminal." Implying that, if the cops used the same logic on a neighborhood with criminals, it'd be sensible for them to assume every member of the neighborhood is a criminal. That point seemed to go over OPs head as he replied as if I wasn't making a facetious point and implied that cops do indeed do that. Presumably he thinks that's a bad thing when they do it but is perfectly reasonable for him to do.
I don't think anyone should be using faulty logic to make claims about groups of people.
> If you support the cops on this
I never said I did and, as such, the rest of this comment is not directed to me.
> In my mind, what makes something a statistically safe assumption would mean that, more times than not, you'd be right.
I assume I should buckle my seatbelt.
Not every car ride results in an accident. But enough do.
Do you personally know any police officers? I do and, as a group, I've found them to be more racist than the general population. I don't know what the working definition of "white supremacists" is in this context but it doesn't make me blink.
This phenomenon happens with more than just police too—I've seen it happen with medical professionals, firefighters and EMTs as well.
0. Be a white person who has little to no interaction with non-white people in your day to day life.
1. Get a job where you interact with some of the dumbest people in the general public on the regular.
2. Some of those dumb people will invariably be, say, black. And you'll interact with way more black folks than the none you're use to interacting with.
3. Because you have no other association with that group your brain pattern matches and draws the connection.
4. Boom racism.
I find it hard to judge these people too hard because I haven't been "tested" in the same way. Like I want to believe I wouldn't fall down this pipeline but everyone says that.
We can't on one side ask for people to not make judgment based on statistics and on the other side saying that making a shortcut based statistics is valid.
Won't someone think of those who falsely accuse someone of kidnapping when they get a similarly ridiculous accusation against them?
This is part of why we have juries. The letter of the law must be nullified sometimes in the interest of justice.
Statistically speaking "murderer is black" is a sensible assumption in US [1], but I'd prefer it wouldn't be made
[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
The chance of a random black person being a murderer is substantially lower than the chance of a random cop being racist.
> Statistically that's a pretty sensible assumption.
Also, you know, protected opinion.
Doesn't really matter since police officers are public officials. The bar for defaming a public official is actual malice, which is clearly not the case here. They need to prove that he deliberately said facts that he knew were false with the deliberate intention of harming them. It was also obviously a satirical song which further weakens the case. This is such a weak case it should have been thrown out before it ever reached trial.
Honestly, "actual malice" part probably the thing both parties here agree on existing. It's a series of diss tracks, they're inherently malicious.
You're just allowed to be maliciously right about things, if you like.
It's a NY Post article. Expect some slant, and find a second opinion.
It's not smears when it's (mostly) true or opinion.
Civilians, in the middle of the forest: We want our privacy.
This flavor of police: You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public place.
Afroman: Here’s a video of cops inside my home.
This flavor of police: Stop being mean!
Interestingly enough this is not the first time cops have invaded a famous rapper's house and the rapper proceeded to make a music video out of the footage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nfVWiXY3WY
Neighbors by J. Cole
I was gonnna click the link, but then I got high.
I would’ve posted to say what I think, but I got high.
Can't be bothered to upvote, and I know why
I don't understand how they found nothing in the raid, wouldn't they normally bring drugs with them to plant? If they forgot those that's a whole new level of police incompetence.
> wouldn't they normally bring drugs with them to plant?
Why do you think they were so annoyed at all the cameras?
I guess they assumed that a musician whose whole persona is built around weed would supply the evidence.
> Common enough to be a minor plot point in a current cop show...
You've reversed cause and effect. Cop shows don't base their plots on what is real, they base them on what people will believe is plausible.
They tell us over and over again that we should have no expectation of privacy or not being filmed in public. Well, IMO they should not have any expectation of privacy or not being filmed when on private property.
Police, and government agents in general, should have no expectation of privacy when doing their job, period. If you have to hide your face then I don't trust you. And yes, that applies to all of ICE.
Is the NY Post some kind of National Enquirer analogue? This article reads like it was written by a grade school child trying to emulate the voice of an villainous news reporter.
Yes. Here's an AP article:
https://apnews.com/article/afroman-police-raid-lawsuit-ohio-...
Thanks for sharing. Much better source.
Yes, it's a pretty over the top paper. Feels like you're reading TMZ for stuff that didn't happen.
Yes, it's a right-wing tabloid. Our equivalent of the Daily Mail.
I haven’t found any information about what cause the police had, why a warrant was issued, etc.
I’m not suggesting suspicion has merit, but given all the idiocy I’m wondering what other forms of chicanery may have taken place to get a warrant.
Tip from a “confidential informant”, I believe I read somewhere.
From Afroman's BATTERAM HYMN OF THE POLICE WHISTLE BLOWER: https://youtu.be/HM8Ee6pcXvQ?t=190
Nah its just that simple. Racism is still alive and well. Don't overthink this.
I’ve had “lemon pound cake” stuck in my head all morning thanks to this
I've heard "Randy Walters is a son of a bitch, ooooh oooooh, uuh!" the entire day today after hearing the song yesterday, probably the most catchy one to come out of this whole story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4AiuqQpB1U
My mind went to K&P rap confession skit : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14WE3A0PwVs
Gotta say I love Afroman's choice of courtroom atire.
I made this joke in another thread, but: I keep imagining Afromans court getup as the formal attire for American civil lawyers. Like robes and wigs, suits n ‘fros.
Related. Others?
Do the cops suing Afroman after raiding his home have a case? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36827566 - July 2023 (19 comments)
Police sue rapper Afroman for using footage of home raid in his music videos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35284187 - March 2023 (551 comments)
US Police raids home; sues homeowner over CCTV footage of raid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35281258 - March 2023 (53 comments)
Damn, that case took a long time to resolve. You know what they say about justice delayed...
That it's the only type of justice you can ever hope to get in the US, if any at all?
Never thuoght i'd see Afroman at the top of the Hackernews articles haha
Okay at first I was like this music is not my style, but the humor was so good.
Same. It was such low quality video and audio, but I stayed for the same reason you continue listening to a comedians story
One of my favorite parts is when Afroman is being cross examined about why he brought the media and his lawyer to retrieve his money.
He says, well that was for my protection because they came to my house with AR-15's and turned off the cameras. "I didn't want to get beat up or Epstein'd".
And the lawyer is trying to make that out to be unreasonable, that a black man in the US shouldn't be scared of the police. Afroman just continues to assert that of course he was scared.
How come so many cctv’s inside his house?
Maybe he’s justifiably paranoid?
He got burglarized before, and got threatened with arrest after demanding police investigate. https://www.tmz.com/2022/08/22/afroman-home-raided-police-oh...
It's a small county with an extreme minority of black people, like a couple hundred or less. It's quite likely he had personally encountered some of these officers before, and almost certain they knew who he was. Within the realm of possibility he saw something like this coming. Small rural sheriff depts are astoundingly corrupt.
Is there anyone who isn't super rich who feels safe in america anymore?
Is it the same in other countries, can cops just raid you for no reason, or abduct people (ICE) and that's not the biggest story in the country?
Arrests aren't abductions. You can't change the words and suddenly make criminals into victims.
If they have a warrant maybe. If they don't, abduction seems right.
In addition, you're not a criminal until you are convicted.
ice has literally abducted citizens with no criminal record. those people are victims.
Law enforcement can arrest people or detain people.
You're subbing in "abduct" for one of those words.
abduct: to seize and take away (a person) by force
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/abduct
sounds like what happened to me.
Law enforcement arrests people every day. It's their primary job.
You're not confused about the term. We all know the difference.
correct, i am not confused about the term "abducted", and i stand by what i said.
Those cops are the epitome of the term “cry bully”.
Suing for invasion of privacy over a music video demonstrating how they invaded his privacy is wild!!
Heh.
> their constitutional privacy
Isn't that something that people are always pointing out "is not guaranteed by the Constitution"?
The Constitution guarantees the right to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects".
Which means what the Supreme Court says that it means. It's easy to imagine that it means something akin to what people mean by "privacy", but interpreting the Constitution is infinitely malleable so I don't have any idea what it means.
Defamation is the most boring version of this case. Barring dishonest editing, of course it's fine.
There are hypothetical versions of this that get more interesting. Ohio is a one-party consent state. It's not clear what happens in a two-party consent state. Law enforcement has no expectation of privacy in public spaces. Private is "it depends," think cases where low enforcement is discussing something with one party in a domestic dispute. If he had used bodycam footage, then you get into interesting copyright laws. Is it public domain, and if not, is it sufficiently transformative to qualify as fair use (think April 29, 1992 by Sublime).
> If he had used bodycam footage, then you get into interesting copyright laws
Not that interesting. The US government cannot create copyrighted works. Works created by the government are public domain. This is why Ghidra (made by the NSA), for example, has a really odd license, where the parts written by the government are "not subject to U.S. copyright protections under 17 U.S.C.", whereas future contributions by the public are covered under the Apache license.
Y'know, officers, if you'd shown up to his house after the raid and apologized and offered to buy the guy a new door of his choosing and the installation for it, we're probably not having this conversation.
They don't have the emotional intelligence for that.
They got what they wanted.
Afroman is the exception that proves the rule.
If you aren't a platinum-selling rap star they will abuse you without recourse.
That lemon pound cake did look tempting though.
This was also on youtube - Afroman made his points very clearly. That was an easy case.
Makes you wonder why taxpayers have to pay for incompetent cops all the time. I understand that some proection is needed, but the whole system is really defunct if such cases even (have to) come to court.
I know things are bad in the USA right now, but news like these show that you still have your basic rights. This kind of song would not fly in any other country on Earth. No other country has Freedom of Speech laws strong enough to defend against insulting the police. There have been some people abusing their freedom in recent times cough Kanye cough, but for every loud nazi there are ten more excellent people whose right to speak should not be infringed!
> This kind of song would not fly in any other country on Earth. No other country has Freedom of Speech laws strong enough to defend against insulting the police.
I'm fairly certain you could do the exact same thing here in Canada. I honestly don't think it's as exceptional as you're making it out to be.
Canada has better defamation laws than most of Europe (as truth is an absolute defense), but the US puts the onus of proving falsehood on the plaintiff, not the defense, in cases concerning public figures. The US's freedom of speech laws are one of the few truly exceptional legal constructs we should be proud of. Most other good legal concepts the US has pioneered have been copied to similar or greater effect abroad, such as the ADA and worker's comp.
> This kind of song would not fly in any other country on Earth. No other country has Freedom of Speech laws strong enough to defend against insulting the police.
What? You have no idea what you are talking about.
> This kind of song would not fly in any other country on Earth. No other country has Freedom of Speech laws strong enough to defend against insulting the police.
What? There's lots of antifacist/rather left-wing music that heavily critizes the police and their work. Usually not the one police officer himself but rather the institution as being part of a state who behaves injust (is that a word? non-native here...). I think that's fine and is part of a democratic system.
This wasn’t a 1A case, it was a civil defamation suit. He won because they failed to prove defamation, NOT because the judge threw out the lawsuit because of a violation of constitutional rights.
Separately: saying something shitty or unpopular that you disagree with isn’t someone abusing their rights to free expression. Expressing unpopular viewpoints that others consider abusive is exactly the point of such rights.
There’s a REALLY BIG reason it isn’t “freedom of expression, except for expressing racial hatred”, and it’s not because we like racism. Germany sometimes bans entire political parties that they declare unconstitutional. Now imagine that power in the hands of Trump. You can see what Putin did to Navalny for a preview.
> Germany sometimes bans entire political parties
You make it sound like Germany bans political parties every other year.
Germany formally only ever banned two parties:
- Socialist Reich Party (SRP), 1952 - Communist Party of Germany (KPD), 1956
For context: The Federal Republic of Germany was founded in 1949.
There are current discussions about banning - or evaluating a potential ban of - the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). If the ban went through (I think it won't), it would be the first in 70 years.
Perhaps interesting here is that some of the things he said were definitely not defensible via "truth is an affirmative defense." But it's ultimately up to the jury, and they can also find him innocent because a reasonable person wouldn't be offended by outlandish accusations.
(Ultimately, though, they can find him innocent for any reason. If they decided he should walk because you can't legally offend cops, that's fine too.)
Truth is far from the only defense.
Opinion is not defamatory. Satire is not defamatory.
With public officials like police, even false factual statements are not defamatory unless you knew they were false and lied about it specifically to hurt them.
> Now imagine that power in the hands of Trump.
The Germans would argue such powers prevent the Trumps.
cowsay "lemon pound cake"
As someone who has never seen that video before, could I respectfully say:
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
Thank you, Ohio cops and lawyers, for bringing this to our attention.
When he started reversing the video around lemon pound cake I really thought the officer was backing up to take a piece lol
I highly recommend watching the video that made the other cop cry.
Licc’em Low Lisa - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wWQxSV8CK8 (NSFW, depending on your workplace)
Please post the link!
The judge really loved the cops for some reason. So embarrassing for him.
Well, he probably interacts with them on a daily/weekly basis, or at least other people from their department, and probably don't want to end up on their bad side.
In the end, justice and freedom of expression seems to have prevailed, so doesn't really matter what the judge think/thought in the end.
If you think "justice and freedom of expression seems to have prevailed", then please consider the people who aren't famous and can't get media attention when this sort of thing happens to them. Justice and freedom of expression fail to prevail on the regular and this is just one win amongst many, many, many losses.
Even just in this instance justice would include damages for their destruction and an inquest into the warrant from the cop that wrote it to the judge that signed it.
For this one case. He seems to be a horribly biased judge though from what I saw in this case over the three days.
Justice didn’t prevail. Afroman had to spend THOUSANDS defending himself in this bullshit civil lawsuit, and his countersuit got thrown out because police have qualified immunity.
This is after they raided his house, bashed in his door, broke his cameras, stole his money, and then didn’t charge him with a single thing (and only returned part of the money).
There is no justice here.
One of my local (several states away) bakeries announced a "Afroman lemon cake macaron" today.
His legal costs are gonna be tiny versus his YouTube/Spotify revenue out of all this.
(And I wouldn't ignore the value he probably applies to being proven right in court, either.)
Which is great for him. The point being this happens to other people who aren't famous, and maybe don't want to spend their time asymmetrically fighting for themselves on social media.
That's fine, but "There is no justice here" is incorrect.
How so? The positives you described had nothing to do with the courts. That's just an outcome of his own savvy. If he didn't make the video or the song, he would be out a lot of money. That's not justice, that's an entertaining person using their virality to claw back some of what was taken from them. How would that go for Joe Average?
This is the story of a guy who got sued for being harassed and had to waste years of their time and money fighting it.
One of the more interesting parts of the whole ordeal was officers getting on the witness stand and declaring that the lyrics that insinuated he had had sex with their wife were deeply traumatizing.
People keep throwing around 'cuck' as an insult, but if trained officers of the law familiar with application of deadly force when necessary can be severely traumatized by the notion of another man sleeping with their wife... Maybe the cucks have been the brave ones all along?
It's important to remember to thank them for their service.
was this on the regular media? I've been bombarded by this case on tiktok for the last 5 days. and i don't follow police, law, celebrity, or rap.
Yes.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/19/entertainment/afroman-lawsuit...
Including internationally:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq57557d6p6o
gotta love some Streisand effect in the morning...
As fellow Ohioan Chrissie Hine and The Pretenders said, "Ay, oh, way to go, Ohio."
Yeah, it was from "My City Was Gone," which isn't a pleasant song about the state, but pfft, it works here.
It works here because it isn't a pleasant song about Ohio.
I would argue that using the footage ought to be legal; they are in his home.
Posting their names is questionable; as officers they are public servants, but naming them is perhaps invasion of privacy?
Lying however would be slander and illegal, in my humble opinion. Not worth 4 million in damages, but at least a cease and desist?
> naming them is perhaps invasion of privacy?
No. The President of the United states is Donald Trump. His address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and his phone number is 202-456-1414.
> Lying however would be slander and illegal…
They couldn't prove he did.
I’d argue that’s rather different than just a cop somewhere.
He said they were criminals, and that the woman was actually a man..
My understanding is he said "Adams county sheriff's are crooks because they took my money" (which is not disputed)., and individual officers, who weren't actually mentioned by name, sued because someone else was responsible for taking the money
> He said they were criminals, and that the woman was actually a man.
If that were defamatory, 90% of QAnon would be in court.