Something that seems amiss in the article: For-profit prisons are, to my knowledge, a common thing in the US, creating an economic motivation to put people into prison. That might be another reason why people are kept in prison longer in the US than elsewhere.
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Something that seems amiss in the article: For-profit prisons are, to my knowledge, a common thing in the US, creating an economic motivation to put people into prison. That might be another reason why people are kept in prison longer in the US than elsewhere.
I bet in some jurisdictions the police would come with guns drawn and park on your lawn just for inconveniencing them, or something as spiteful.
dhanson865
Well-Known Member
No, I meant charged and punished.
1. It implies that they might get convicted but that isn't required.
2. Many cases here involve something called a plea bargain. Often the person involved will voluntarily take the lesser penalty and avoid a trial and thus avoid a conviction.
In many minor cases in the US they do this thing where you agree to the punishment and they either
a. don't put it on your record as a conviction to begin with
or
b. put it down but with the understanding that they'll remove it from your record after a set period if you don't do a similar or more serious offense. I believe they use the term expungement.
either way as a lay person I don't consider those people convicted since they never had a trial and don't have a criminal record after the fact.
Of course this can be overdone and be a burden on innocent people that can't afford to fight the system but my choice of wording was based on how it is not how I think it should be.
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Statistics, please. What data do you have to support your conclusion?
I think your conclusion is subject to highly biased reporting in the statistical sense: the horrible incidents get played up in the mass media, the ordinary interactions remain unreported. So, yes, there have been cases of shooting first, pet killing, and human deaths. But I suspect if you were to look at the overall stats, policing in this country is very safe. Which is not to say that it can't be better still, especially in regards to interactions with unprivileged minorities.
Criminals take lives, hostages, money and even pets....
Alan
I think your conclusion is subject to highly biased reporting in the statistical sense: the horrible incidents get played up in the mass media, the ordinary interactions remain unreported. So, yes, there have been cases of shooting first, pet killing, and human deaths. But I suspect if you were to look at the overall stats, policing in this country is very safe. Which is not to say that it can't be better still, especially in regards to interactions with unprivileged minorities.
Criminals take lives, hostages, money and even pets....
Alan
strider
Active Member
I think a lot depends on what color you are. Also, you should do some research on civil forfeiture. Finally, police officers (at least here in California) are paid an obscene amount of money (on the order of $200,000-$300,000/year when you do the math on what their pensions are worth). So I expect to get value for my money. That means not throwing a flash bang grenade into a crib while serving a no-knock drug warrant on the wrong house.
IMO I think this whole thing went wrong when the police started being trained by the military (some could even say it goes back further to when they stopped walking around their beats). The military is trained to dehumanize their enemy to make it easier to kill them. In the military it is necessarily "us vs them". But that is the wrong mentality for a police officer and leads to the kinds of confrontations we're seeing now.
Canuck
Well-Known Member
You are wrong. No one is ever charged and then sentenced. There must be a conviction. A plea bargain involves a conviction. A sentence cannot be imposed without a conviction. Read the link below if you still think you are right.
What does Plea Bargaining mean in law? ... all plea bargains result in a conviction because the defendant must plead guilty as part of the plea agreement.
Plea Bargaining legal definition of Plea Bargaining
legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Plea+Bargaining
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Seriously, who cares? This is an extremely pedantic argument that undermines what the poster was trying to convey (which I think all here understood).
Canuck
Well-Known Member
I don't agree. The issue is what we do about people mistakenly reporting to the police children being put into a trunk of car. dhanson865 wanted them charged and to do community service. I said you can't do that without convicting people of a criminal offence, which I found unacceptable. He replied saying I was wrong, and now you expect this misinformation to remain uncorrected? Correcting that misinformation which will likely be read by many people and assumed to be correct is not pedantic. Plus...
mknox
Well-Known Member
Sadly, I think that is true. There was a fairly large protest in Toronto yesterday (Black Lives Matter) as a result of some recent fatal police responses. And it does seem extreme. Some guy armed with a hammer is shot dead? Really?
artsci
Sponsor
Here are a few statistics to ponder:
According to FBI statistics, there were 461 “justified homicides” by police in 2013. However, the website KilledByPolice.net reported that U.S. non-military police killed 748 people in just the last eight months of 2013, and 1,100 in 2014. The KilledByPolice numbers were compiled using mainstream media sources. Actual totals are undoubtedly higher, as not all police killings are reported, and it is virtually impossible to check all of the tens of thousands of media sources in the country.By contrast, in England police reportedly fired guns three times in all of 2013, with zero reported fatalities. Police do not carry guns on patrol in England.From 2010 through 2014, there were five fatal police shootings in England, which has a population of about 52 million. By contrast, Albuquerque, N.M., with a population 1 percent of England’s, had 26 fatal police shootings in that same time period!In 2011, the FBI reported 404 “justifiable homicides” by U.S. police. Based on the data collected by KilledByPolice for 2013 and 2014, the real number of police killings for 2011 was likely over 1,000. There were two reported police killings in England, meaning that the rate of killing by U.S. police was about 100 times that of English cops in 2011.The same year, German police, who do carry guns, reportedly killed six people. Germany has a population about one-quarter that of the U.S. So on a per capita basis, U.S. police were 40 times as likely to kill as German cops.Canada, another multi-national state with about 12 percent the population of the U.S., also reported six fatal police shootings in 2011, meaning that U.S. cops were 20 times as likely to kill as their Canadian counterparts.
This is what happens when everyone in the US armed to the teeth.
breser
AutoPilot Nostradamus
Unfortunately this is changing. More and more police are carrying guns in England.
For what it's worth. In my opinion the police should be your absolute last resort. Think of calling the police as asking for someone with the authority to use physical force to come resolve your problems for you. If you think the situation really calls for that then by all means call them. But I think there's an awful lot of situations that don't call for it that people take that action. Then again I don't subscribe to the idea that the world is as dangerous as many people suggest it is. Nor do I believe that I need to be protected by my government from everything.
Canuck
Well-Known Member
I believe it's much, much more dangerous than people suggest it is. The problem is that our technology is quickly surpassing our humanity when it comes to the availability of weapons, and in particular dirty bombs but also to a lesser extent, but growing fast, nuclear weapons. To me, it's no surprise that someone like President Obama who, when campaigning for the Senate, and addressing questions about the intersection of national security and privacy, took aim at the Patriot Act for “violating our fundamental notions of privacy,” and he told the Democratic National Convention, “We don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries.”
Then look what happened when he became President and was given inside and classified information. All that went out the window. Why? My theory is that it's one really scary world when you are in the know. Plus, the real question is not "if" there will be another major attack in the US (one which will likely dwarf 9/11) but "when".
It was only just over 25 years ago that I met my wife in Greece (she was also travelling from New Zealand) and we travelled to remote parts of Turkey for a month, and people routinely traveled to Egypt, and Israel. Yes, the Middle East was unstable, but not nearly as bad as today. I'd never go to those places now. We're moving backwards, not forwards.
What ISIS Really Wants - The Atlantic
dhanson865
Well-Known Member
I didn't say sentenced, I said forced to do. You might weasel around it and say these people volunteered and weren't forced but I'd call the threat of conviction and harsher punishment is force enough even if that is a bluff.
Judges in the US often make a person do community service and then if the person does it dismiss the charges and/or expunge.
See Dismissal Vs. Expungement | Greenville Criminal Attorney
also see
Sentencing Alternatives: Prison, Probation, Fines, and Community Service | Nolo.com
where it mentions diversion
I'm not going to go into any further detail or arguing with you because you keep wanting to say i used X legal term when I used Y layman phrase.
You've got it in your head that I have no idea what I'm talking about and that's fine. Just don't come back with a response that puts words in my mouth.
breser
AutoPilot Nostradamus
I think there's a much simpler explanation. Obama never really believed what he was saying while running for President when it came to privacy. Comparing his voting record in the Senate with the things he was saying is instructive.
But I wasn't talking about terrorism but rather about normal crime. Violent crime in the US is actually relatively rare. It's gone down for quite some time and is at historic lows. Yet if we listen to the media we'd believe that things have never been more dangerous.
Nor was I talking about the situation in the middle east. The situations in other countries do not in and of itself justify an ever growing desire to involve the police in so many situations they are unnecessary to be involved in.
But unless the supposition here is that ISIS is going to be kidnapping kids in Tesla's. I don't really see the relevance of your response.
I actually am in agreement with you re civil forfeiture, no matter the statistics on that issue. Law enforcement should not have incentives or even simply the ability to deprive people of property without benefit of an appropriate (presumably criminal) conviction. Most people can't afford to go to trial or put up much of a fight. Worst is when the agencies themselves benefit from the seized assets; hard to believe in their impartiality.
Alan
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Thanks for these stats. Depressing.
That said, these stats are normalized to population headcount. They don't take into account frequency of police/civilian interactions amongst the respective populations. Nor do these stats yield any insight into the severity of these particular interactions, e.g., how many of the killings were justified -- and I mean justified in the way that most readers of this forum would understand, not justified in the sense that a policeman simply said he was in fear of his life when barging into, say, a bathroom occupied by someone who had been fleeing -- and how many were completely unjustified.
In all the countries you cite, the prevalence of handguns is so vastly different than in the US that the police operate very differently and with a greater implicit expectation of safety; I think you capture that thought in your last sentence re everyone in the US being armed to the teeth.
I am not trying to argue that there is NO problem to be solved with the way in which police can be trigger-happy, especially with respect to minorities. It's clear to me that there is such a problem, and it's bad. But I think blanket generalizations can be injurious as well -- all US police are NOT bad. All US police are NOT corrupt. We have some of the least corrupt, most professional police services in the world. One has only to travel to (many) other parts of the world to see how bad law enforcement really can be. We're not doing nearly as well as a bunch of the Europeans. We're doing way better than most of the rest of the world. We should be willing to acknowledge what we're doing well as we work to fix the obvious problems we also have.
Alan
Alan
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Thanks for these stats. Depressing.
That said, these stats are normalized to population headcount. They don't take into account frequency of police/civilian interactions amongst the respective populations. Nor do these stats yield any insight into the severity of these particular interactions, e.g., how many of the killings were justified -- and I mean justified in the way that most readers of this forum would understand, not justified in the sense that a policeman simply said he was in fear of his life when barging into, say, a bathroom occupied by someone who had been fleeing -- and how many were completely unjustified.
In all the countries you cite, the prevalence of handguns is so vastly different than in the US that the police operate very differently and with a greater implicit expectation of safety; I think you capture that thought in your last sentence re everyone in the US being armed to the teeth.
I am not trying to argue that there is NO problem to be solved with the way in which police can be trigger-happy, especially with respect to minorities. It's clear to me that there is such a problem, and it's bad. But I think blanket generalizations can be injurious as well -- all US police are NOT bad. All US police are NOT corrupt. We have some of the least corrupt, most professional police services in the world. One has only to travel to (many) other parts of the world to see how bad law enforcement really can be. We're not doing nearly as well as a bunch of the Europeans. We're doing way better than most of the rest of the world. We should be willing to acknowledge what we're doing well as we work to fix the obvious problems we also have.
Alan
Canuck
Well-Known Member
I agree it's good to stay on topic but by page 10, when the topic has been all but exhausted, I thought you were going elsewhere especially when you used the word "world" regarding being dangerous. That took it out of the States and kids in the trunk of Teslas for me.
I'm not as cynical about Obama as you are. I think he believed the content of his speeches and never thought as President that he would kill a US citizens overseas without due process. But that all changed when he was fed inside information.
@dhanson865, we'll have to respectfully agree to disagree. The police cannot charge people simply to threaten them into a diversion program since that is not how our justice systems work. The police present charges to the State (or Crown in Canada) for the purpose of obtaining a conviction (if the grounds exist) then it is the prosecutor that decides if diversion, or some other course is better. You can't have the police charging people to be forced or diverted into community service.
SW2Fiddler
We Are Cognitive Dissidents
deonb
Active Member
The police can't fine you either. They can only give you a summons to appear in court. You can however instead opt to plead guilty beforehand and pay a fine instead of actually appearing, but that still makes the conviction a role of the court - not the police.
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