Listen to my full interview with Tim Tolka, the author of Blue Mafia: Police Brutality and Consent Decrees in Ohio on Patreon: bit.ly/3YauDEi You can learn more about Tim here: bluemafiabook.com/ www.timtolka.com/
I live in a country where every officer needs to know First Aid (If not you can't bei an officer and every few years, I don't know anymore, they learn it again.) and If they use their weapon in any way they need to explain why and what happened, ect. They learn over a long time how to be a good cop and and and. I heard in america is the "learning phase" for a cop 9 months. Is this correct? I think it's two or three years in my country. It would be a good beginning to work on that, to give them more time to learn how to make the job. We have problems with the police too, but it isn't the norm and because of that it's always a big thing for the public where I live. In Return we have trust in our police system. Not always, we have problems too, more Tan enough, but you know what I mean.
I know it wouldn't correct all problems to give them a better education in how to make the Job right, but it wouldn't hurt, I think. Maybe I am just naive, because I don't live in america and don't live with all this problems with the police.
@@illuminahde In my country the learn how to negotiate without any violence and to stay calm and make decision in a stressful Situation, but how to take a weapon from a criminal with minimal force too. Maybe it's because our gun law is very strict and I never expiences it different, but it just seems dangerous to give someone a gun who never learned all these things. It's just so strange to see someone "assist" an officer while he arrests someone. Our system has problems too, I don't say ist the best or it works all the time, but a proper Traininng would be a great first step I think.
@@followthewhiterabbit884 Agreed. If you listen closely in the clip you can hear the officer getting upset. This is because they are trained in the military to use overwhelming force to subdue. This is a big problem. Learning to properly control a suspect on the ground could prevent so much. Think about how that officer would have acted if that guy wouldn't have helped? When the dude reached for his gun, it's pretty safe to assume somebody was getting shot. As big as the cop was he didn't know how to use his weight. He had to be coached by a civilian. That's a problem.
My partner’s sister is a public defender. She has made police officers cry on the stand by showing surveillance footage that proves that they committed perjury against her client.
Let's not pretend lying is beyond the realms of a lawyer. It's literally their job to try and get their client off by all legal means. And they get to sit there and lie without the threat of perjury. That officer will be fired for lying on the stand.
So, former social worker here- I think every social service is rife for reform. If you look at the institutions needed to serve and nurture a community like education, child care, infrastructure, medicine, crime prevention, etc. you'll notice that these institutions have a lot in common: low wages, long hours, decreased effectiveness and high burnout. It's not just the police. They're just the ones that are causing the most immediate and measurable harm. Every social service field has been devalued to this extent.
The thing that bothers me the most about this video is how issues like this are completely overlooked. Police aren’t the only thing in need of reform, everything is. The police are just the most obvious and David Simon addressed that in both The Wire and We Own This City but people completely overlook that. It’s sad to see one issue go overlooked because the most obvious one takes all the spotlight.
The more time I spend in the social work field, the more I realize that due to the objectives of the field, it can't really be allowed to have that much power and coexist with institutions like the police, the courts, and the larger justice system as a whole. If it had the economic, political, social, and cultural power to achieve its goals, it would likely cause radical change within those institutions or make them redundant enough to lose importance & power. Because of this, it's going to be very difficult and or impossible to have social services in many cities across the country even close to properly funded without some sort of political & economic reform.
@@Ellman1231 yess. My biggest complaints were that we didn't have the power to criminally charge the worst abusers, and that there was no such thing as preventative services. Pair that with a culture of keeping cases open, "just in case," and it's easy to feel like a cog in a machine that exists to justify itself.
@@andreaobaez864 100%. It's very easy to see why so many leave the field feeling burned out & jaded. I was originally offered a job with child protective services right out of getting my undergrad degree, and a mentor of mine talked me out of it. She said that even though the money was a little bit better than other jobs I qualified for, if I went into a job like that with little to no experience setting boundaries with clients as well as supervisors, I would burn out within a year. My first job ended up being within the addictions field instead, and it's probably why I'm still a social worker (with several slight burnouts along the way).
Police in my city bulldozed a homeless encampment, then lied in a city council meeting about the nature of the encampment, said it was transient (There were people who had lived there for months). They also lied about “stepping on needles everywhere” when in their own photos, you can see that sharps were stored in plastic containers, that were destroyed by the police. And when an investigative journalist from Uprise RI interviewed at least 5 encampment residents, they all said the same thing, their encampment was at least 100 ft away from the bike path, the 2 members who used needles put them in sharps containers, there was no bus that arrived to take them to Providence, RI, where they would be put into an overcrowded warming center that isn’t even open at night, and they were given only a half hour to remove their belongings, many of which were destroyed by Woonsocket PD and Department of Public Works. And that’s if they were there, one encampment resident had to go to the hospital because her father was dying, her father passed, and then she came back and all her belongings were destroyed. When local organizers asked the Mayor and Public Works director for a formal apology, they declined to apologize and asked for an apology in return. Police and city government lie all the time, and rarely face the consequences for their actions. This is Woonsocket, RI, please boost the articles from Steve Ahlquist of Uprise RI, the level of cruelty that our city government and police have engaged in over the years is appalling. It rarely gets covered outside niche local media: upriseri.com/woonsocket-city-officials-homeless-encampment-eviction/
This comment could have been about Rochester NY. Last year in November the city abruptly kicked everyone out of an encampment and moved them to a rat infested lot next to a sewer. They also had no warning. Luckily a comrade from my DSA is really involved in unhoused outreach and got a UHAUL over there quickly so people could take their belongings with them. I had just started participating in the DSA and was supposed to hand out supplies that very week at the encampment. I was shaken to the core at how fast the city just came in fucked everything. There were local nonprofits involved in helping the people of that encampment and it was shut down by the city without a second thought. I have since done outreach near where the encampment was and everyone I met was a kind and gentle soul. Fuck the police and fuck the city for their cruelty.
This thing happens in many mid-large cities across the country, regularly. Police don't even have an ethos. They don't uphold the law. They don't protect. They are basically just a gang with gov backing.
Tyre Nichols was recently beaten to death by five police officers. He did nothing wrong, and they kicked him in the head, tazed him, pepper sprayed him, struck him with steel batons, and picked him up and took turns beating him with fists like a literal punching bag. In his last moments of consciousness, he cried out for his mother who was in a house just a block or two away. The cops laughed about it as they continued striking him.
@@Al-ji4gd You can move on if you don't like this comment spreading awareness about a situation instead of being a bitch about it, nobody is gonna hold it against you.
Imagine police brutality being so ingrained in the system of policing that people literally quit after being told not to brutalize citizens as if they literally can't imagine a better way to do their job than to go out of their way to murder, torture, lie, and contaminate evidence. It gives "but if we don't have slaves who will pick the cotton?!!" vibes.
"I need a group of people willing to put their lives on the line. Willing to stand there and take abuse after abuse being hurled at them. I need a group of people who I can call upon to do something I myself don't want to and would never think of doing.... Why aren't there more people signing up for this job?"
@The2012Aceman police are not those people. What are you even talking about? Cops are typically societal outcasts with very little avenues in life. They're not heroes willing to endure all hell just to save innocent people(at least not most of the time). They're pretty much scumbag dregs. Also who cares about the abuse they endure? That doesn't rationalize or excuse them brutalizing other people. If you can't handle the demands of the job, don't fucking sign up for it. Being a cop is 100% voluntary and you can quit at literally any time. You literally signed up for it, especially to DIE in service of protecting others. Now stop whining about it.
I mean maybe just fire them for not doing their jobs and train new people to do it the right way. That's pretty much what they did in Camden, NJ. They abolished their police department and rebuilt it completely from the ground up.
@Swordsman1425 yeah and did that work? Because as far as I'm aware cops get arrested for domestic abuse, sexual assault, alcohol and drug related crimes, and assault at a rate higher than the general public. It's not a bug it's a feature.
I don't think We Own This City portrays the cops as working-class joes. When Jenkins talks of money, it's either as a proud boast or in envy of others. What did Jenkins spend his ill-gotten gains on? Strippers, hookers, and fine dining. These guys took the money out of greed and a sense of entitlement. In a sick way, they genuinely believed that they had a right to take money whenever and wherever they wanted. It's right there in the title of the show.
@@napatora PD is just another literally blue collar job. Until 'reforms' recently, in the form of a HUGE police pay raise, in my city, I made more running my water plant than my PD sorta-coworkers did. I thought, no way I'd put on body armor for less than I make now, lol. Now they start like $5/hr more than me with 8 years here, because we needed to 'attract quality officers'.
@@RobertMorgan I disagree- mostly because cops are the ones that the rich call when the working class get too uppity and try to strike, unionize, or otherwise do anything except let the rich and powerful wring them for every cent of their labor.
He boasts about all that money and party spending, but it's shown to be money that he robbed. Which it's good that the show, presents how much money they stole from the city, but I can see how people would think their paychecks alone would only provide them as much as a "working class joe" earns.
I live in Baltimore. It's crazy living in a city with the highest police spending per capita when kids all over the city are literally forced to miss school because the dilapidated buildings don't have working heating and cooling systems. And I guess I shouldn't be surprised considering this city's history. There's something about living in the birthplace of Redlining that makes everything else about Baltimore's history make so much sense. One monumental racist policy gave birth to many baby racist policies and bam, you have the Baltimore City Police Department. You have one of the most impoverished cities in America inside one of the wealthiest states in America. I love this city and want it to win so bad. Everybody that has a decent income/job CHOOSES to live in this city as a form of protest. As a show of our love. Because we see the beauty of this city IN SPITE of what it has been through. And thus, we want this city to thrive. But the unfortunate reality is that this city was already sabotaged some 70 yrs ago. Long before my parents were born. And it has been a steady race to the bottom since. I have not lost hope though. There's just too much in this city's history that shows us it would take a monumental effort (and reparations) the likes of which this country has never seen to make this city whole again.
Really love this comment, it's a beautiful tribute to the city. I've never been (just another English superfan of The Wire) but after watching so much TV set there, I find myself oddly invested in its future...
You are not entitled to reparations. As far as school goes, only 7% percent of students in Baltimore City can read, write or do math at grade level. You want to give them more money? The budget for the city is 1.6 Billion dollars, 21k spent per student in the city. It's not a money issue. Want less interaction with the police, then do something about the absurd level of violent crime. We need community reform more than police reform. I also see you bring up redlining as an excuse. Honestly, you going to tell me black kids are killing each other and failing to achieve at school because someone's great grandfather couldn't get a home loan 80 years ago?
@@BassGuitar4life "Want less interaction with the police, then do something about the absurd level of violent crime." HIGHEST SPENDING on police in the country yet Baltimore still has a massive crime problem HEY GUESS WHAT BUCKO MAYBE SPENDING ALL THAT MONEY ON POLICE DOESN'T FUCKING WORK
@@BassGuitar4life you realize that the police were super corrupt in Baltimore and they didn't do shit to deter lowering crime as it would put many politicians out of careers? Cops have a quote to adhere to bro, lol. You fools always looking from the outside in. People will commit crime with less socioeconomic opportunities. If local governments won't change poor neighborhoods, then surprise surprise! Violence isn't going away anytime soon. As for your redlining comment, you ever live in a suburb where a ton of upper class or wealthy White or especially Asian people do a bunch of low-level blue collar crimes? Exactly. If you grow up poor and without access to the same resources as those generationally well off, you will do whatever it takes to survive and make a living.
"Police Brutalizing black people - A story as old as America" Honestly I was just in a conversation about this. Like, all these police forces, basically all the ones in the world, are modeled off of the London metropolitan police. Which was, in turn, modeled after the way that England 'kept order' in the colonies. That SPECIFIC system started in the late 17th/early 18th century, and was how it was done basically until they left India. So like, John Adams never met a cop. Thomas Jefferson never met a cop. But they did meet people who had the exact job descriptions cops do today. Adams specifically met a few of those people, specifically members of the 29th Worcester Regiment of Foot (now the Mercian Regiment under Lieutenant-General Ian Cave), when he served as their defense lawyer after they shot at a crowd of protestors, killing five people. The first one being Crispus Attucks, a half-black, half-indigenous man who was, at the time, not even one of the protestors. As a result, Attucks is often considered one of the first Americans killed in the Revolutionary War. In addition, this event and others like it, were what led to the 3rd Amendment of the United States Constitution. An amendment which is largely ignored... Because we came up with the idea of reclassifying our soldiers as 'Police.' So like... Police Brutality: Literally older than America... And the police are probably themselves just straight-up unconstitutional.
Of the 500,000 interracial crimes committed in America each year, over 90% are committed by blacks against other races. About 10 unarmed black men are killed by police every year. Stats are racist
@@illuminahde 1) That has literally nothing to do with anything I said, did you mean to respond to someone else? 2) I notice you compared "Crimes" to "Murders". Murders, after all, specifically involves when you SUCCEED at killing someone. What about cases where the victim was shot, beaten, or otherwise attacked, but recovered? 3) And in fact, specifically "Murders of unarmed black men," a list which would not include people like Tamir Rice (12, considered "Armed" ) Aiyana Jones (7, female), or Breonna Taylor (female.) 4) How do you define an "Interracial crime?" You were very specific in that you were limiting the discussion of police killings to cases where the victim was 1: Unarmed. 2: Black. 3: Male. 4: Died. But 'interracial crimes' is far more vague. For example, when Amy Cooper misused 911 to call the police and claim a man was harassing her when he clearly was not, was that an interracial crime? Some people would say yes. Amy Cooper was a white woman, Christian Cooper (no relation) was a black man. Other people would say no, because the crime was misusing 911, and thus the victim was the city of New York, which is a legal construct that does not have a race. Or how about if a Hispanic person shoplifts a cake from a Baskin Robbins franchise with an Indian owner. Is that an interracial crime? Well, some people could say yes, the Hispanic person stole from an Indian person. Others would say no, the Hispanic person stole from a store, and the store does not have a race. What about cases where there's more than one perpetrator? Or more than one victim? When Elliot Rodger (British father, Chinese mother) killed his three roommates, was that two interracial crimes (Two were full Chinese) or is that all Asian-on-Asian violence? What if a crime is committed with indiscriminate, multiple victims? For example, imagine if a half-black, half-hispanic man was evicted from my apartment building, and in anger committed arson, which lead to the deaths of myself, my girlfriend (hispanic), and a black couple (black)? Is that four interracial killings, because none of us are black-hispanic? What if an officer of an institutional landlord company commits perjury in order to evict ten tenants from a building they own. If the person who signed the papers doesn't know the races of the people being falsely evicted, is that an interracial crime? What if a fully black man gets in a fistfight with his half-black, half-indian half-brother, is that interracial? If a Japanese man kills a Chinese man, for racist reasons, do we NOT consider it interracial because they're both Asian? Hell, is a dude keeping an exotic animal as a pet interracial? I mean, his race isn't "Lion," is it? And while all of these questions are ones YOU might have an answer to, the question is whether the numbers you cited are going to have the same answer. Which, again, would still only answer questions about that number, and not baout the fact that you are comparing "Killing of unarmed black men" to a list of crimes which can include anything from pickpockets to pedophiles. I don't know about racist. But, to quote Mark Twain, there are three types of lies. Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.
@@HyenaDandy I get that you like to focus on the man bites dog story in the news but your anecdotal stories and hypothetical potential happenings fail to address the issue. When you speak about policing and violent interactions with the police you give black people no agency. As if resisting arrest and committing crimes is not an individual choice. My point was 12.5% of the population does this and then finds it curious when the police recognize patterns. When is it ok to say it's a problem? Your pattern recognition focuses on the exceptions that prove the rule. The fact that you can't name as many white victims should cause you pause. Because there are many many many more victims. That's why it's easy to see your concern for the black community is politically motivated. That's fine but rich kids shouldn't tell poor families about reducing crime by defunding the police. P.S. there were more than a dozen white kids shot by police with toy guns while you read about Tamir Rice. Bad parents come in all races.
@@HyenaDandy Oh, Mark Twain also wrote about a guy named ngr Jim so let's quote someone else please. Since you seem to question the numbers, African American men make up about 6% of the population and are responsible for over 50% of the murders. That's why I used the specific framing I did. It's not numerology.
@@samiam884 type in FBI crime statistics. I could have broken down by age as well for you. As in, black men between the ages of 13 and 30 are about 4% of the population yet commit over 50% of the murder. (I'm simply using murder but you can use any violent crime, including sexual assaults) If you commit more crimes then you have more interactions with police. It's simple. Covering your eyes doesn't make this topic go away and treating black people with no agency is the Real racism.
As a person with alopecia, I really appreciate your sense of humor about the condition. I actually think it makes you look more unique and stand out more as a person.
Have to say its pretty interesting that Berenthal took this role considering that you can find him posing next to Punisher skulls with the thin blue line on them, and at NY Comic Con I believe he even talked about how he was excited to play the character because of how much the Punisher meant to law enforcement. Maybe after 2020 he did some reflection.
@@galactic85 he's a cop bootlicker but he occasionally says some based stuff but then also goes on joe rogan and says he has no idea what toxic masculinity is , when he played shayne on the walking dead lmao
It's always funny how cities have to pull funding from other programs to cover the costs of police reform, despite most PDs being grossly over funded to begin with.
It's because most of the police department's budget is spent on buying military grade hardware so their corrupt cops can also be a corrupt paramilitaty organisation
Lifelong Baltimorean. My neighborhood was terrorized by Hersl & the Gun Trace Task Force. My childhood friend was sent to prison for literally years until the DEA investigation revealed the depths these guys were mining, morally. They are not an anomaly; they are the norm, not the exception. Some people can afford to lie to themselves about the police, but even those people are only one encounter away from seeing the truth. The sad fact is that the people who defend the police in these types of debates are just as vulnerable to being preyed upon by the police as anyone else.
"Anyone over 18 carrying a backpack meant they were carrying guns or drugs" - Theory from a Baltimore cop. I live in Baltimore county and I go around Baltimore city to different parts for my work. I work in IT and I carry a backpack with a laptop and various IT supplies and tools. I am well over 18. It is absolutely horrifying to think about. Then again I have the advantage that I might not have "Seemed the type". Like there was something about me that might not have me tagged as a possible suspect. I'm white. And hearing about this, if some of my colleagues had done the same, they might have been victimized by that man or his cronies. Because they are not.
Also the right to bear arms implies that it shouldn't be a problem to carry guns in your backpack. Cops don't like that they lack a monopoly on guns i guess.
@Rex Appleby I've always found that so weird. In a country where it is not only legal but encouraged to bare arms, a cop can murder you for carrying one.
@@rexappleby4731 Literally, yes. Most folks in America who claim to support the 2nd are fucking lying to you - What they actually support is the right for neurotypical financially comfortable white people to own guns, and nothing else.
The cop is right in certain way. That is how it is done. Idk about I in the USA, but in my country, I was told by a "person with knowledge" that cops are somehow very good in figuring out when a person with backpack carries something, though cops are the top professionals here.
It reminds me of a quote from one of the conservative MPs in the UK, essentially "anyone whose curtains aren't open by 8am are lazy, unemployed and scrimping off of the government". Something to that effect. It just shows how tone deaf they are to reality, plenty of people carry backpacks. And plenty of people work night shifts or evening shifts. We are ruled and controlled by people who lack any understanding of what it means to be us.
Funny that Ed Burns, the ex-cop, is actually more clear-eyed about this shit than Simon. You can kind of tell from season 5 of The Wire that Simon kind of _wants_ to be a homicide detective, that he wants to see a certain similarity between the detectives and the journos who cover crime. Maybe that's part of why he's so biased on this.
Yes he absolutely fetishizes the "natural police trope." He even defended some of the national security States data surveillance methods citing its utility in city law enforcement. The wire is the best show ever but David Simon has a huge blind-spot. And he does not respond to criticism well.
I got in an argument with someone who characterized bread tube as "white ppl with privilege telling poor ppl they don't need to work" all I could do was laugh at them, knowing they watch Chicago p.d literally every night.
@@TheNewblade1 I mean they're not entirely wrong, most of bread tube is indeed white people with privilege spouting off about things to virtue signal rather than actually doing something meaningful. It's not much different from being a Twitter activist.
@@LordVader1094 At least they're TRYING! I think u SEVERELY undervalue the power in EDUCATING. 💯 Wtf r YOU doin?! God, I HATE that ppl like u even exist!! Ppl like u r who the Matrix warned about... "U have to understand, most of these ppl r not ready 2 b unplugged. And many of them r so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."
David Simon is nostalgic about Baltimore police in the old days? Does he know how much the KKK was represented in Baltimore police back in the day? And I know a guy who was charged and convicted of murder at age 17, in the early 70s, and given life without parole. He spent 40 years in the Maryland pen. He had signed a confession after the cops threatened to throw him out the window. The information in the confession was completely wrong - even the site of the crime was wrong. There was no physical evidence tying him to the murder. He was only released after fighting the conviction for decades. But instead of exonerating him, the state's attorney forced him to sign an agreement giving up the right to demand compensation. Technically he's still a convict - but they all know he's innocent. His name is Jesse Barnes. The cops are all scum.
You mention that The Wire is a work of fiction, but as you point out David Simon worked for the Baltimore Sun for a dozen years. His co-creator Ed Burns had worked both as a public school teacher and a detective in the Homicide and Narcotics divisions. A lot of the characters in The Wire were based on real people and I'm sure a lot of the incidents depicted in The Wire were based on actual events.
I find it interesting that videogames generally represent cops in the extreme alternative, usually as antagonists or totalitarian foot-soldiers. Even in something like L.A. Noir, the cops are corrupt and antagonistic, of course, this is because it's more practical and fun for the players, but more often than not, story-wise, a powerful police-force oppresses and kills. See The Last of Us, GTA V, Dishonored, Bioshock, Batman, Assassin's Creed, Saints Row, Need for Speed, Left 4 Dead etc.
wait, left for dead? i don't remember if there's even cop zombies. there's the riot zombies which i guess counts but listing it in all these games like they're even distinct gameplay or character-wise is kinda absurd.
The last of us had very very little tradition policing unless of your referring to the first 15 min when they are overwhelmed. I would certainly not consider FEDRA any type of American policing
Police are a hammer, and whilst hammers are an important part of a toolset, they are not the whole toolset. Swinging bigger and bigger hammers everytime the hammer fails to fix something will only cause more damage.
This is where "results" driven policing can also work against itself. If defunded they will %100 cut away parts that are producing the lowest results. Which means that the parts that "cut corners" and "lie" to get the best results are highly likely to avoid scrutiny and remain within the department preventing any new policies from taking hold and insuring the greatest resistance to positive change.
In France, we had our own "gun trace task force scandal" somwhere in the early 2010, with the infamous BAC nord of Marseille. Police agent from a Brigade Anti-Criminalité (Anti-Crime Brigade), a type plain clothe unit tasked to catch flagrant crime. The whole case went nowhere and the story even got adapted into a movie, that portrayed the cops as some sort of tragic rogues heroes that had to bend the rules to catch some big drug dealer. The contrast between "we own this city" and "BAC nord" has always been something I found quite interresting.
In Belgium you could fill a library with scandals involving the now defunct gendarmerie. Going all the way back to Congo (Lumumba's murder par exemple) and GLADIO
Entertainment media does this a lot. The NYPD has had multiple huge corruption scandals . With bribery being the norm add police officers to did not want to take bribes fearing for their lives. The movie serpico details a big one. New York City then sets of commissions take me to clean out the crime. Law & order touched on this a couple of times. Each time they've made the head of the commission look like an a****** politician.. he wasn't by the way.. despite the fact that in one of them he was going after a cop who literally set up an execution. Look at the list of movies available to you.. the vast majority have a detective as the protagonist
I tried so hard to understand what a consent decree was when I watched the show but I just couldn't figure out what they were talking about. I'm glad you've finally explained it.
Glad to hear that! It was my job to explain it. Problem with We Own This City was they wanted to get into all the important details as little as possible in order to reach the widest possible audience. The cost was not really showing what happened and focusing on the officers (or a few of them) getting held accountable -- but that really wasn't the story, at all. The DOJ got sandbagged because of Trump and Sessions, and Baltimore didn't get any police reform work. Now, the police unions are more powerful than ever -- even with the Biden DOJ using the old Obama civil rights people. Basically, Biden has stayed away from the police reform issue.
He didn't actually explain it correctly. He explained what one was in this very narrow context, but consent decrees are also used in disciplinary hearings before professional boards and in family law. It's not exclusively federal. The details of child custody are often outlined in a consent decree, and child custody orders are always made at the state level, as are all legal decisions pertaining to family law. I guess a good definition of it would be "a court order used as a form of dispute resolution, signed by a judge and the parties to the dispute, and enforced by the court." Violation of a consent decree results in contempt hearings and/or reconsideration of the case. It's not a contract in the traditional sense because there's no consideration (legal term), but it resembles one. That's the best I can come up with off the top of my head right now at this late hour.
Plus, cops number one function is essentially to protect the property rights of wealthy. Evictions, crushing protest, herding houseless people away from wealthy power brokers
I think David Simon is nostalgic for the days when the percentage for homicide clearance rates was in the 70’s and 80’s pre-drug war, and when cops had a basic skill set for investigating violent crimes.
Except that time has NEVER EXISTED in US history. That's the point that Jackson is making. He knows what Simon is alluding too, but the problem is that David Simon is nostalgic for a time that is a complete fiction. Investigation skills are and always have been fundamentally flawed. There is a reason that news stories come out every year about someone who was locked up for decades being cleared by DNA evidence. The 1970's comes in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights movement. In the 1960's police were cracking down on the Civil Rights movement. Even if they had good skills for solving violent crimes there is now way they were applying those skills universally. There is no way that in a time of legal segregation the police were devoting the same amount of resources to solving the murders of someone who was black and someone who was white.
It's a shame he's seemingly incapable of grasping the fact that they still disproportionately terrorised minority communities in those days too, it wasn't idyllic
To be fair, it's not like anyone else could reform police either, since police reform is a contradiction in terms. You can't reform something that is bad by design, because it's already functioning as intended.
@@samk522yes, you can because it can always be made good by design instead of bad by design. Even If it is functioning as intended, you can always change intention.
I love this series but goddamn, sometimes I have to watch new uploads in parts because it all just gets me so mad, makes it hard to work on a monday afternoon lmao
it’s true and why i probably can’t even watch we own this city, but something about the way skip intro presents it doesn’t trigger me the same way say, watching the news or john oliver does. skip is chill and presents so matter-of-factly, it soothes as it enrages lol.
one of my favorite things about the wire was that even the cops u liked did their dirt. It showed that their system enables the worst people no matter the situation. Thats why its confusing seeing simon say he dont want to defund the police. How can you misunderstand the purpose and you seen the evidence?
Because he wants to misunderstand. He's too attached to his socially-conditioned, romanticized image of police to understand it's something that never existed and never can. His life's work is based as much in worship of this fictional "good cop" as it is in seeing the evil that cops actually do.
Cause defunding the police is retarded. Like let's say you want better roads so you're going to defund public construction, does that make sense? If you want to improve standards, wouldn't you want to fund the police more to hire better talent, improve training and get rid of the troublemakers?
@@songcramp66 Using your analogy it would be more like we want better roads but the taxes we pay for better roads or being misused after constant years of increasing budget and improving training to no avail. So instead of continuing to fund mistakes we decide to reallocate funds from that public construction department to a department specifically designed to construct on streets instead overall construction in the city. The problem with what u said is you left the context of how we got to this point and framed as people waking up one morning and saying take all the money away and thats not the case at all. This was a build up and police has failed at almost every turn with corruption plaguing almost every department in america and thats not an exaggeration Take away the police and look at it like this. If you fund a business as a angel donor and constantly it fails, wouldnt you move your money around to a better situation? Thats all de-funding does
When you took your hat off my feeling of the world f'ing me eleviated. Last year when i was 26 i randomly started losing my hair. It was reall bad. I stopped going out except for work. Going to get my hair cut was... just the worse. I had longish hair and man it was just bad. Its been a little under a year since it started and it has started growing back. Before i knew it would come back i really excepted some truths. My wife will always love me, i will always love me and the people who took the time to notice i had just disappeared are so appreciated. My hair started growing back in different colors and people think its cool. I dont. It just reminds me of all the places i had no hair. Fuck it sucked man and hope you get yours back but even more than that i hope your ok. It took some fucking courage to share with your audience and i thank you. Thanks.
Not so fun fact if you ever get a good look at the Shoulder Patch used by the Montana Highway Patrol you’ll notice at the bottom of the patch 3-7-77. The number is a lynching call sign that was infamously pinned to the chest of Frank Little when he was lynched by the Butte City PD.
I'd argue that the negative effects of the war on drugs were the reasons it was started. Maybe its a bit conspiritorial but I think mass incarceration of people of color and the empowerment and militarization of the police were the goals way more than solving any drug crisis. It's why it's still going despite not achieving its goals or even making any real progress. As always the cruelty (and the racism) is the point.
What I think kills me is the idea that the person sent by the justice department doesn't know about testilying and is caught off guard by this whole affair. It's like lady, I get why I might not have known in 2013, but you're the long arm of the law sent here to handle this problem and yet you don't know about one of the most basic tools that police use to continue their behavior. It's like, becoming the head of nintendo after years of studying games and arguing that you are one of the most knowledgeable devs in the industry and then saying you don't know wtf Super Mario is. It makes a stronger statement than ever that every part of this system is fucked, that it can perpetrate all this shit not only because the system allows it, but because those in charge are so disconnected from reality that they are completely unaware of the most basic aspects of it.
I just started watching your Copaganda videos so I'm really glad to see this show up. I thought We Own This City was a very good and very important show, but it seems like not many people paid attention to it. Even the Emmy Awards somehow ignored Jon Bernthal's performance... though they usually ignore David Simon projects, which shows how out of touch they are.
@@Darkpara1 You watched this entire video and still think abolish/defund means to get rid of completely? Something tells me your militia is gonna have a lot of issues.
One time I got a traffic ticket for a rolling stop at a stop sign. I stopped at the sign and my view of traffic was blocked by a business sign, so I stopped then rolled up to a point I could see while still not being in traffic. Then I stopped again, and then went. I explained this to the cop ignored the truth and then went I fought the ticket they testified that what I said wasn't true. I took pictures of everything to prove that what I said was true and the cop was lying. The judge refused to even look at the photos. The cops word made the judge refuse to even listen to me. So yeah, the cops are full of shit and I will always vote in a jury for any non-violent crime defendants. Cops always lie, and that is just the tip of what I have experienced with police.
With the quote regarding NYC, there was a major reduction in cops during the time due to Covid, BLM and Defund the Police. NYC also has an issue with the DA's not prosecuting actual crimes that aren't minor possession charges causing Police not to enforce laws anymore.
I disagree on only one thing, Simon does not portray them as ‘regular joes’, he portrays them as greedy and entitled. Wayne gets hung up on the size of his crabs or lobsters for gods sake, seafood is already seen as an expensive delicacy. It shows he can already afford nice things, he just wants more. He gave off ‘daddy got me a BMW but I wanted the Range Rover’
To be fair to his view of the war on drugs timeline; the effects and militarization that the war on drugs ended up funding took time to spin up in different areas. To also be fair, he should have been a part of it throughout most of his career.
I think Defund the police policies are really interesting ideas. Except. Social Workers can't replace police officers because social work is also super, super corrupt. I have a lot of friends and acquaintances who burned out of social work convinced that they were doing more harm than good. One friend watched a colleague commit multiple felonies without batting an eye. She was caught, but only for one crime. Policing is horrific. And Social Work is barely, barely functional. Not even sure what would help at this point.
Policies that actually focus on crime prevention. If we made it a point to get rid of poverty that's a huge chunk of crime that is reduced. Free school lunches. Expanded maternity leave and pay. Free or reduced child care expenses. A dramatic increase of housing supply in major cities, more robust public transit services, free Healthcare, reestablishing mental health services, finding a better way to fund schools, raise min wage, reinstate maximum income, restructuring the foster care/child protection service. You know instead of paying foster parents to take care of kids with bio parents who are struggling, we can pay the bio parents. All of this will help defund the police and give them a significantly reduced role and we can fund social work and provide more resources so they are not overworked and underpaid. But ultimately the goal is to reduce or eliminate both of their jobs.
Social work may be corrupted, but it's not innately so. The police, as an institution, are inherently bad for society. There's no "corrupting" police because the job is oppressive and harmful by definition. Social work can be cleaned up, made more functional. Policing can't be.
@@Playaboy5 Abolition is the only real solution. Our entire concept of "law enforcement" needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. What the new system looks like specifically is a large topic with a lot of room for variation, but the central point is that the institution we think of as "policing" needs to be done away with, not just reformed.
John Oliver's law and order episode would fun to see you watch... he basically went over how forced interrogation happens and how the police watch SVU and those shows to get their information.🤣
This was by far my favorite entry of the copoganda series. You did a great job of providing different perspectives and reasoning for both sides. I really appreciate the interviews as well. I love the symmetry of the video starting and ending with the same clip. Fantastic video and very thought provoking
At 22:40 ,I live in Brooklyn ny and that story reminds me of the time I had to serve in a grand jury for two weeks to hand out grand jury indictments. One of those cases, a disabled black woman was being charged with possession of an illegal firearm , possession of a dangerous weapon and some other charge because they found a gun in her apartment in the closet. Now grand juries are really weird because there’s rules as a juror you have to follow and the main one is that you can only make indictments based on the evidence presented by prosecutors and defense testimony if there was any. It lacked any nuance as to why certain things happened and what led to certain actions. I’m this case, the cops just randomly knocked on her door to check to see if anything was going on because “they heard banging and yelling earlier and the day before. We weren’t given probable cause for even approaching that door or even reasons to why that door was being targeted. They just appeared there and that’s all we had to go off of. And then disabled woman answered the door, they said she let them in to search on her own accord, and they searched the entire apartment and found a bag of three guns buried in the closet and arrested her. The prosecutors left, because they can always bring more evidence and info later on. They came back the next day saying that the reason they were at that door was because they had a warrant for an arrest of guy who lived there, which happened to be her cousin who according to the woman in her testimony, had let stay there for a few weeks. She said she had no idea that the guns were there and that she kicked him out of the apartment days prior to the cops coming in and searching the apt. She had no history with the police before and was disabled with two kids of her own who stayed with her on the weekends. We weren’t allowed to hear or take on account those facts because they were related to the facts of the case. The facts were that the guns were in her apartment and that by law we had to make the ruling based on that evidence. I remember how dirty it felt making that decision because a lot of us felt pigeonholed into that outcome. I didn’t think she deserved 3 felony charges at all. And it isn’t a unanimous decision , it’s a majority rules thing. That’s why the saying is “if prosecutors really wanted to, they can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich”. It’s so skewed and disgusting. I used to hear about grand jury indictments coming down on ppl, and thought, well, this was legit. Or hearing how prosecutors couldn’t get grand juries to indict cops being corrupt or behaving horribly. And now I see, it’s all fucking collusion. Funny thing is, even if we didn’t give the “true bill” indictment, the prosecutors could still continue to prosecute these individuals regardless. And I’m like, what is the point of keeping us in this room for 8 -10 hours 5 days a week listening to these cases???
I dont understand how cops quitting would result in more crime when cops report all the crime statistics. And didnt cops walk in NYC one time and the opposite affect happened where crime went down?
Regarding crime rates "increasing after defunding the police", it's also useful to consider that crime rates are based on arrests made by the police. In many situations, increased crime rate actually means increasing policing rate. The police decide to punish a community by going on an arrest spree, it is then reported as higher crime rates.
The policing stats chase has nothing to do with capitalism. It is entirely a government institution. It has to do with being able to show the voters "good stats" so that judges, DAs, and mayors can boost their political career.
@@Schrodinger_ Policing has to pump the stats. Capitalism has to bump the numbers. I wasnt connecting the two directly, simply illuminating a trend in which trying to create something out of nothing results in harming the weakest people.
@@WizWiteKnight you hit the nail on the head, the issue with government programs is funding is determined by statistical change and not real added value much like modern wall street driven capitalism. Lots of smoke and mirrors.
Teach a group of society that they can lie openly, but never be lied to themselves.... Why did anyone think there could ever be an 'honest cop' outcome?
I had Professor Brunson last semester and we got very close. Telling me I will do great things. However, he does push back against socialism when I did bring It up in class discussion or privately. Great professor
Stumbled upon your channel lately and have been loving your informative and, I think, fair view point from the actual center of the issue. Great job with every video I’ve seen so far.
Regarding the whole Simon vs Abolitionists bit, I think it shows the catch-22 of the defund movement: it's a terrible slogan for such a complex issue. Just look at how much the public in the US has 180'd on the issue in the last two years alone. Sure, it was driven in part by conservative firebrands stoking a moral panic, but a lot of the calls against defunding came from minority communities themselves. The calls were especially loud among asian communities, who were experiencing a massive wave of hate crimes, and black communities themselves, who were caught in the crime spike post-covid. Sure, we can debate the systemic causes of that, but those communities probably won't see that as anything more than platitudes. Heck, in Minneapolis, we saw a defund-backed initiative to change the MPD go down in smoke because of opposition from black voters, as well as Jacob Frey getting re-elected. For twitter abolitionists to be taken seriously, they need to do a better job navigating the issue with some nuance and divorce the system from the people working and living under it. Otherwise, it'll just be one step forward and two steps back over and over again.
Also you can not cancel a system like the war on drugs and replace it with social programs and expect overnight results. And cancellation of the war on drugs is the biggest cost cutting measure you can do. I have seen the change in crime statistics after adding youth centres and etc. But all of this is long term. There's no utopian past and no utopian future. It's always messy. But we can definitely do better and learn.
The whole point of the “terrible slogan” is to get you to talk about this. Also, you should engage with actual abolitionists in-person where you live. Online comments only go so far.
@@selalewis9189 lmao I live in New York and nearly all of the PoC that live near me are decidedly NOT for abolition. Kinda telling that white people want police gone and PoC who are more likely to be victims of crime aren't. Also it doesn't matter if the reason is to get people to talk about it when all they're saying is either how terrible it is or conservative propaganda. You've poisoned the movement before it even began if you do that. Fucking stupid internet leftists...
@@selalewis9189 Your average joe isn't going to see a terrible, or any, slogan and go 'oh, i wonder what they really mean'. They're going to have a kneejerk reaction because slogans are meant to short-circuit your reasoning. Slogans are often a person's first interaction with your idea, so it needs to give the right impression so they're amenable to further conversation. You have a terrible slogan and nobody is gonna want to talk to you. You're not gonna want to have a conversation with a movement whose slogan is 'down with the blacks' even if it turns out that they're talking about the east asian concept of a 'black company'. (Edit: edited to restate my point in a better way)
Living in LA through the Rodney King Riots through the post-Rampart Reforms I can confirm that the LAPD has definitely changed in town. They don't roam the city like a uniformed street gang anymore, but there are still leaving behind a fairly high body count.
15:50 - This is a real problem. For a very brief moment in the BPD post Freddie Gray, the cops got out of their patrol cars and did foot patrols. Then that went totally tits up as cops refused to work OT, left for the counties, and performed an Italian strike. Aka: they went AWOL. It was bad enough that when I was robbed afterwards, the detective who took my case was one of two people working as a detective for the whole station (there should have been 8-10.) Now in my other anecdote with BPD, they caught the guys, but I literally had 911 on the phone during the B&E and had a video of them that was only a few minutes old by the time they arrived.
I got into your series two months ago and I thought man I wish he'd do a We Own this city episode after the The Shield one. My prayers have been answered!
Something that makes sweeping police reform hard that almost nobody talks about is the uniquely decentralized nature of police in the US. No other country has thousands of different police agencies where most officers are trained by and work for a local municipality. Everywhere else either has most police organized on a national level or by state/province, and this means they have broader tax funding, consistent and longer training, and standards enforced by a simplified oversight system (rather than thousands in the US as each department investigates themselves). Where I live, there are two departments with overlapping jurisdictions that are radically different in how they operate (thanks to completely different training and culture), and people will check their shoulder patch before interacting with them. Saying something like "police budgets are bloated" is oversimplifying to an absurd degree since there are nearly 20,000 different agencies, many of them funded exclusively by poor communities.
I really think people should lie about having bad experiences with cops, if asked, when being considered for Jury 'duty'. Seriously, if you care about justice for your fellow citizens, LIE...and do not play into their scheme, they are trying to remove people who might actually question police departments/ the authorities. If it's something else? If you're called for a murder trial, and you've had someone close to you murdered, then sure, let them know.
Hey, great video, as always! Thanks for the educating bit about consent decrees, I need to read about them more. Some points below: If you view the police as another gang then you really should extend the class analysis benefit (low means pushes people to crime & vice versa) to police as well. Ironically, it even supports the DS argument from his Twitter rant - if you get a formation that practically advertises themselves as 'violence privilege without repercussions' then sure as hell it will attract some protofascists and sociopaths looking for violent release. This probably is connected to your discomfort when you see scenes showing relatable moments from police officers' lives. We could of course portray them with more dehumanizing means but that would be missing the point completely. Just as in The Wire, the point is to show people entangled within the system which basically railroads their actions. Dehumanizing them is similar to saying that Third Reich citizens were just all evil monsters and while it may make us feel good in the short run, in the long run it's going to make us blind to what exactly is causing the systemic issue in the first place. You could even argue that this is basically essentialism and that shit's conservative af. My personal reading is that DS shows the human side of the officers not for asking us to be lenient but to be aware of the whole picture. Your dad / uncle / grandfather could be a great person in your home (although domestic violence stats say otherwise...) but a complete piece of shit in work. This systemic approach also translates to the next point which is 'The Wire' not showing activists enough. While I generally agree with this, I suppose it comes from the notion that the whole framework needs to change, otherwise the best activists will be just more meat in the grinder. Unless it will be the scale of civil rights movement from the sixties. And I think it's fair to say that what point of view was missed in 'The Wire' was at least better shown in 'We Own This City'. In the end, I think DS writes what he knows best and that is the police. And about DS not liking prison abolitionists, it's more like DS does not believe in idea of complete abolition at the end of this road. You can agree or disagree about this but even if you read his Twitter rant & responses, he basically agrees about defunding / rechanneling the funds of the police just as much as Burns does. True, he was being a a bit of dick about it in a 'old man yells at cloud' vibe but have you seen people that were tweeting at him, that's some prime toxic cesspit that had entirely discouraged me from using Twitter at one point. All in all, I am under a strong impression that you both agree about that is the desired outcome, considering the reality of the reform.
You'd be surprised. Drug legislation, just like gun legislation, changes by statewide efforts. Don't worry about the fed, theyll change when the state's change. Look at Colorado.
Ireland's police force, An Garda Siochana (The Guardians of the Peace) or more colloquially referred to as 'the guards' are largely unarmed. Today guns are for the most part illegal in Ireland, but the guards were created right in the middle of a civil war when the country was awash with them. Obviously completely outlawing private ownership of firearms in the states would be a pretty radical idea, but I think that it's worth considering. There were 39 murders in Ireland in 2021. Compare this to nearly 350 in Baltimore alone during the same time period. Guns obviously aren't the only factor at play here. Ireland is one of the most well educated countries in the world, and has a decent social welfare system (depending on who you ask at least), but I think that taking guns out of the equation, for both police and citizens would have a marked effect on both crime rates and the ability of the police to act out of line.
It’s not defund the police, it’s fund the community. This funding should be partially reallocated from police funding. And police should be relieved of doing work they are not equipped to do and shouldn’t be doing.
When you talk about Cops being the fist of capital, I kept thinking you were going to do a callback to the 50 Shades scene of negotiating about fisting.
My main problem with the defund the police movement is that it wouldn't solve the problem. Police NEED the money they have. They NEED to be using it in an entirely different way. They need to be using it to pay for hundreds if not thousands of hours of training that isnt implemented or required right now. They need that money to adequately pay for mental health screening and administrators for proper and more in depth background checks (cloeser to whats required for dod certifications) so that we dont have problematic people being hired into the departments. The problem isn't the amount of money they receive, its how they're allowed to use it. It shouldn't be used on new fancy guns, drones, and dozens of other unnecessary forms of technology.
These small numbers of high-risk offenders with disproportional amount of crimes, they are always well known by the police. One could say they are best buddies by now. One aspect that always pokes me in the eyes of "knife attacks" and "terror attacks" those perps were well known by the police and other state agencies and they "neglected their duty" or even helped them get to their destination.
It would be interesting to see his channel tackle, in my opinion, one of the biggest copaganda show "The Closer" and "Major Crimes". With the lead character being ex-CIA interrogator who got the nickname "The Closer" for her ability to "close" the case by any means necessary.
The way these shows differentiate between homicide cops and drug cops reminds me of Columbo. They share that cadence of "Woah, hey, he's a cop, but he's not an UNLIKEABLE cop! He's going for the REAL bad guys! Here, watch him let this prostitute go. He doesn't even brutalize the suspects! Isn't he such a kind, lovable shmuck?" And, yes, Columbo IS very lovable, but he's still representative of the prison system's (if idealized) core values: A crime demands punishment, and it is a cop's duty to stop at nothing to administer it. Columbo harasses and bothers; he pushes the boundaries of his suspects to just the point before illegality. And they're rich bastards, so it feels good, but maybe.... it's still copaganda. Whoops.
What’s fucked up is I started watching this show just thinking it was a sequel to the wire and had no idea the events were based on a real story. It wasn’t until they started getting really specific with that one Sean Suiter who died the day before the trial.
Thanks for this vid -- I think this is your best one in the series. Following up on your last point, it would be really good to see you take on a show that's about activists or community leaders so that the focus isn't on cops. I don't actually know of any shows like that though.... would love a recommendation if you or anyone else happen to know of a good one.
Other countries have police forces that don't constantly murder their own citizens. I don't know how to get from here to there. Maybe it will take firing every currently serving cop and restarting each department from the ground up. But there is a better way out there.
Great video! Always looking forward to the next copaganda installment! As re-explained to me recently, you're not going to convince a majority of people to defund (or even imagine abolition) until the societal work is done to change our relation to capital. Due to white supremacy and capitalism being tied together, the protection of property comes before human life, especially the lives of black people and other POC (and those who don't ascribe to whiteness). You're not going to get change from a liberal legal system that tries to reform an institution founded on slave catching and union busting. So investment in people through social programs for housing, healthcare, and education would alleviate the fear of increasing crime and total anarchy.
I: Agreed. But please don't perpetuate the conflation of "anarchy" with "utter chaos". Anarchism is a specific polititcal and philosophical thought (forgot the proper term), and using "anarchy" to mean chaos (while in fact, anarchism is about scrutinizing and dismantling unjust hierarchies) stigmatizes anarchists
Boston actually is an example of how private community activists failed, and how necessary it is for the government to intervene in providing social services. Reverend Eugene Rivers was (and still is) a con-man who through violence and intimidation (including to other reverends to have the monopoly of access to murder victims’ families…) got a monopoly on grants to the inner city violence and used it to enrich himself. I’m a documentary filmmaker and the issue on the ground is really really complex. The police is definitely structured awfully, and the prison system is actively recruiting neo-nazis. But we can’t either run blindly into ideal solutions which sound fantastic in theory (“charities will save us”) but can turn out disastrously in practice. Not to be too commie, but the government needs to step in, increase taxes, and provide additional social benefits to at least reach the level of the bottom quarter of developed nations.
I love this. He not only talks about how something can work and has worked, but slowly picks at its flaws and shows that it isn’t perfect and can backfire. In my opinion, we need police for the police. Truly make them accountable and put more funding into training. The reason bad cops stay bad cops is cause there are no consequences
When it comes to police in America, there’s only a Black view, and a White view. No one else’s view count if you’re in between. That’s just facts. I wish the world could change but it’s still the same as it was since my great x8 grandmother was here and it’ll NEVER CHANGE. I accept the things I cannot change.
While I'm sure you already planned on making this video, I'm gonna take a small amount of credit for suggesting it in the comments a while ago when I saw no one else speaking about it. Keep up the good work man I absolutely love this content
A reform I'd take is financial transparency. Showing how our tax dollars are spent would be the proof either side of reform would need, is it more effective to fund deterrents or alternatives? Best part, the numbers are already done and if their books have nothing to hide...
Dude you ALREADY have access to public budgets. Did you even try searching through your state's records? An effective reform would include tearing down the concept of "qualified immunity" - the cops have had literal decades upon decades to prove that it's necessary. They failed. It's time to make them responsible for their crimes.
@@Hawk7886 anybody going to Target with a budget can tell you a budget and a receipt are two very different things. Paystubs, deposits, withdrawals, and donations are what I'd like to see. This conversation always stalls because emotions run high and then people get off subject. Numbers are numbers. Do funds have an impact on crime? The first question is always how to fund a reform. Receipts will find those funds through surpluses
@@dmarmartin I feel like transparency doesn't do much to help the issue when the ability to punish bad policing remains the same. We see what they're doing and spending the money on as is, but so what? They still own the city
@@mattmoy24 transparency can help by removing morality out of the conversation. Any budget meeting after will have to rely on facts and justify why a community's tax dollars will go towards anything other than the community itself. The cops and officials will have to tell their communities why the cops need cosmetic or discretionary funds over fixed roads, housing, or school supplies. I've never seen a cop car with chipped paint, a dent, or a scratch, and yet vagabonds and custom pickups are the norm. You don't need to look pretty to "catch bad guys"
32:44 Yes, thats 100% David Simon...the bad thing about it...he is absolutely right with this. It is a war against people, especially poor people, not against drugs.
Can you add subtitles to your videos? I recently found you and love your content but my auditory processing issues makes it hard to understand what is being said at some times. Thanks!
40:47 You say "We Own this City is not critical of the police as a concept, as an institution" just after you show a clip of an activist talking about how the police hunt black people, and that new rules won't change that. Idk why you treat the police commissioner's opinion about the police needing more funding as the "show's opinion" but not the opinion of the activist. Seems like the show explains both perspectives without telling you which is right.
Listen to my full interview with Tim Tolka, the author of Blue Mafia: Police Brutality and Consent Decrees in Ohio on Patreon:
bit.ly/3YauDEi
You can learn more about Tim here:
bluemafiabook.com/
www.timtolka.com/
I live in a country where every officer needs to know First Aid (If not you can't bei an officer and every few years, I don't know anymore, they learn it again.) and If they use their weapon in any way they need to explain why and what happened, ect. They learn over a long time how to be a good cop and and and.
I heard in america is the "learning phase" for a cop 9 months. Is this correct? I think it's two or three years in my country. It would be a good beginning to work on that, to give them more time to learn how to make the job.
We have problems with the police too, but it isn't the norm and because of that it's always a big thing for the public where I live. In Return we have trust in our police system. Not always, we have problems too, more Tan enough, but you know what I mean.
I know it wouldn't correct all problems to give them a better education in how to make the Job right, but it wouldn't hurt, I think.
Maybe I am just naive, because I don't live in america and don't live with all this problems with the police.
@@followthewhiterabbit884
ruclips.net/video/wiRUPfg14j0/видео.html
They desperately need training
@@illuminahde In my country the learn how to negotiate without any violence and to stay calm and make decision in a stressful Situation, but how to take a weapon from a criminal with minimal force too. Maybe it's because our gun law is very strict and I never expiences it different, but it just seems dangerous to give someone a gun who never learned all these things.
It's just so strange to see someone "assist" an officer while he arrests someone.
Our system has problems too, I don't say ist the best or it works all the time, but a proper Traininng would be a great first step I think.
@@followthewhiterabbit884 Agreed. If you listen closely in the clip you can hear the officer getting upset. This is because they are trained in the military to use overwhelming force to subdue. This is a big problem.
Learning to properly control a suspect on the ground could prevent so much. Think about how that officer would have acted if that guy wouldn't have helped? When the dude reached for his gun, it's pretty safe to assume somebody was getting shot.
As big as the cop was he didn't know how to use his weight. He had to be coached by a civilian. That's a problem.
My partner’s sister is a public defender. She has made police officers cry on the stand by showing surveillance footage that proves that they committed perjury against her client.
Let's not pretend lying is beyond the realms of a lawyer. It's literally their job to try and get their client off by all legal means. And they get to sit there and lie without the threat of perjury.
That officer will be fired for lying on the stand.
@@Darkpara1 yes,prosecutors also lie to win their case because it is literally a game to them.
@@Darkpara1Yeah dood, but there aren't roving packs of lawyers roaming the streets trying to ruin people's lives for no reason.
@@Darkpara1 If you had bothered to watch the series or the video essay you'd find out most officers aren't even disciplined for lying on the stand.
Good on her.
So, former social worker here- I think every social service is rife for reform. If you look at the institutions needed to serve and nurture a community like education, child care, infrastructure, medicine, crime prevention, etc. you'll notice that these institutions have a lot in common: low wages, long hours, decreased effectiveness and high burnout. It's not just the police. They're just the ones that are causing the most immediate and measurable harm. Every social service field has been devalued to this extent.
The thing that bothers me the most about this video is how issues like this are completely overlooked. Police aren’t the only thing in need of reform, everything is. The police are just the most obvious and David Simon addressed that in both The Wire and We Own This City but people completely overlook that. It’s sad to see one issue go overlooked because the most obvious one takes all the spotlight.
The more time I spend in the social work field, the more I realize that due to the objectives of the field, it can't really be allowed to have that much power and coexist with institutions like the police, the courts, and the larger justice system as a whole. If it had the economic, political, social, and cultural power to achieve its goals, it would likely cause radical change within those institutions or make them redundant enough to lose importance & power. Because of this, it's going to be very difficult and or impossible to have social services in many cities across the country even close to properly funded without some sort of political & economic reform.
Yeah, Child Protective Services is just as corrupt as the police
@@Ellman1231 yess. My biggest complaints were that we didn't have the power to criminally charge the worst abusers, and that there was no such thing as preventative services. Pair that with a culture of keeping cases open, "just in case," and it's easy to feel like a cog in a machine that exists to justify itself.
@@andreaobaez864 100%. It's very easy to see why so many leave the field feeling burned out & jaded. I was originally offered a job with child protective services right out of getting my undergrad degree, and a mentor of mine talked me out of it. She said that even though the money was a little bit better than other jobs I qualified for, if I went into a job like that with little to no experience setting boundaries with clients as well as supervisors, I would burn out within a year. My first job ended up being within the addictions field instead, and it's probably why I'm still a social worker (with several slight burnouts along the way).
Police in my city bulldozed a homeless encampment, then lied in a city council meeting about the nature of the encampment, said it was transient (There were people who had lived there for months). They also lied about “stepping on needles everywhere” when in their own photos, you can see that sharps were stored in plastic containers, that were destroyed by the police. And when an investigative journalist from Uprise RI interviewed at least 5 encampment residents, they all said the same thing, their encampment was at least 100 ft away from the bike path, the 2 members who used needles put them in sharps containers, there was no bus that arrived to take them to Providence, RI, where they would be put into an overcrowded warming center that isn’t even open at night, and they were given only a half hour to remove their belongings, many of which were destroyed by Woonsocket PD and Department of Public Works. And that’s if they were there, one encampment resident had to go to the hospital because her father was dying, her father passed, and then she came back and all her belongings were destroyed. When local organizers asked the Mayor and Public Works director for a formal apology, they declined to apologize and asked for an apology in return. Police and city government lie all the time, and rarely face the consequences for their actions.
This is Woonsocket, RI, please boost the articles from Steve Ahlquist of Uprise RI, the level of cruelty that our city government and police have engaged in over the years is appalling. It rarely gets covered outside niche local media: upriseri.com/woonsocket-city-officials-homeless-encampment-eviction/
This comment could have been about Rochester NY. Last year in November the city abruptly kicked everyone out of an encampment and moved them to a rat infested lot next to a sewer. They also had no warning. Luckily a comrade from my DSA is really involved in unhoused outreach and got a UHAUL over there quickly so people could take their belongings with them. I had just started participating in the DSA and was supposed to hand out supplies that very week at the encampment. I was shaken to the core at how fast the city just came in fucked everything. There were local nonprofits involved in helping the people of that encampment and it was shut down by the city without a second thought. I have since done outreach near where the encampment was and everyone I met was a kind and gentle soul. Fuck the police and fuck the city for their cruelty.
Send this Dr. Rashad Richey
This shit sounds like a lot of what goes down in Sacramento. Will boost.
This thing happens in many mid-large cities across the country, regularly. Police don't even have an ethos. They don't uphold the law. They don't protect. They are basically just a gang with gov backing.
@@theprecipiceofreason this is true - i mostly wanted to bring in another specific case.
Tyre Nichols was recently beaten to death by five police officers. He did nothing wrong, and they kicked him in the head, tazed him, pepper sprayed him, struck him with steel batons, and picked him up and took turns beating him with fists like a literal punching bag.
In his last moments of consciousness, he cried out for his mother who was in a house just a block or two away. The cops laughed about it as they continued striking him.
I think some people would justify or defend the police officers' actions.That's true,isn't it?
Ok, horrific incident, what's your point? That horrific things happen involving police officers? Wow, we never knew that.
@@Al-ji4gd You can move on if you don't like this comment spreading awareness about a situation instead of being a bitch about it, nobody is gonna hold it against you.
@@hadihambali1627 No, no one who knows anything about the case does that. No need to create some kind of false argument.
@@Maya_hee Spreading awreness? It's all over the shop..
Imagine police brutality being so ingrained in the system of policing that people literally quit after being told not to brutalize citizens as if they literally can't imagine a better way to do their job than to go out of their way to murder, torture, lie, and contaminate evidence.
It gives "but if we don't have slaves who will pick the cotton?!!" vibes.
This is why I find it hard to believe that we will be able to make material change any time soon.
"I need a group of people willing to put their lives on the line. Willing to stand there and take abuse after abuse being hurled at them. I need a group of people who I can call upon to do something I myself don't want to and would never think of doing.... Why aren't there more people signing up for this job?"
@The2012Aceman police are not those people. What are you even talking about? Cops are typically societal outcasts with very little avenues in life. They're not heroes willing to endure all hell just to save innocent people(at least not most of the time). They're pretty much scumbag dregs. Also who cares about the abuse they endure? That doesn't rationalize or excuse them brutalizing other people. If you can't handle the demands of the job, don't fucking sign up for it. Being a cop is 100% voluntary and you can quit at literally any time. You literally signed up for it, especially to DIE in service of protecting others. Now stop whining about it.
I mean maybe just fire them for not doing their jobs and train new people to do it the right way. That's pretty much what they did in Camden, NJ. They abolished their police department and rebuilt it completely from the ground up.
@Swordsman1425 yeah and did that work? Because as far as I'm aware cops get arrested for domestic abuse, sexual assault, alcohol and drug related crimes, and assault at a rate higher than the general public. It's not a bug it's a feature.
I don't think We Own This City portrays the cops as working-class joes. When Jenkins talks of money, it's either as a proud boast or in envy of others. What did Jenkins spend his ill-gotten gains on? Strippers, hookers, and fine dining. These guys took the money out of greed and a sense of entitlement. In a sick way, they genuinely believed that they had a right to take money whenever and wherever they wanted. It's right there in the title of the show.
i dunno i work in the trades and that sounds like a lot of guys i work with lol
@@napatora PD is just another literally blue collar job. Until 'reforms' recently, in the form of a HUGE police pay raise, in my city, I made more running my water plant than my PD sorta-coworkers did. I thought, no way I'd put on body armor for less than I make now, lol.
Now they start like $5/hr more than me with 8 years here, because we needed to 'attract quality officers'.
@@RobertMorgan I disagree- mostly because cops are the ones that the rich call when the working class get too uppity and try to strike, unionize, or otherwise do anything except let the rich and powerful wring them for every cent of their labor.
He boasts about all that money and party spending, but it's shown to be money that he robbed. Which it's good that the show, presents how much money they stole from the city, but I can see how people would think their paychecks alone would only provide them as much as a "working class joe" earns.
I live in Baltimore. It's crazy living in a city with the highest police spending per capita when kids all over the city are literally forced to miss school because the dilapidated buildings don't have working heating and cooling systems. And I guess I shouldn't be surprised considering this city's history.
There's something about living in the birthplace of Redlining that makes everything else about Baltimore's history make so much sense. One monumental racist policy gave birth to many baby racist policies and bam, you have the Baltimore City Police Department. You have one of the most impoverished cities in America inside one of the wealthiest states in America.
I love this city and want it to win so bad. Everybody that has a decent income/job CHOOSES to live in this city as a form of protest. As a show of our love. Because we see the beauty of this city IN SPITE of what it has been through. And thus, we want this city to thrive. But the unfortunate reality is that this city was already sabotaged some 70 yrs ago. Long before my parents were born. And it has been a steady race to the bottom since.
I have not lost hope though. There's just too much in this city's history that shows us it would take a monumental effort (and reparations) the likes of which this country has never seen to make this city whole again.
Really love this comment, it's a beautiful tribute to the city. I've never been (just another English superfan of The Wire) but after watching so much TV set there, I find myself oddly invested in its future...
You are not entitled to reparations. As far as school goes, only 7% percent of students in Baltimore City can read, write or do math at grade level.
You want to give them more money?
The budget for the city is 1.6 Billion dollars, 21k spent per student in the city.
It's not a money issue.
Want less interaction with the police, then do something about the absurd level of violent crime. We need community reform more than police reform.
I also see you bring up redlining as an excuse.
Honestly, you going to tell me black kids are killing each other and failing to achieve at school because someone's great grandfather couldn't get a home loan 80 years ago?
@@BassGuitar4life "Want less interaction with the police, then do something about the absurd level of violent crime."
HIGHEST SPENDING on police in the country yet Baltimore still has a massive crime problem HEY GUESS WHAT BUCKO MAYBE SPENDING ALL THAT MONEY ON POLICE DOESN'T FUCKING WORK
Eh, if you’re hoping for reparations I think you already know you set yourself up for failure
@@BassGuitar4life you realize that the police were super corrupt in Baltimore and they didn't do shit to deter lowering crime as it would put many politicians out of careers?
Cops have a quote to adhere to bro, lol. You fools always looking from the outside in. People will commit crime with less socioeconomic opportunities. If local governments won't change poor neighborhoods, then surprise surprise! Violence isn't going away anytime soon.
As for your redlining comment, you ever live in a suburb where a ton of upper class or wealthy White or especially Asian people do a bunch of low-level blue collar crimes?
Exactly. If you grow up poor and without access to the same resources as those generationally well off, you will do whatever it takes to survive and make a living.
"Police Brutalizing black people - A story as old as America"
Honestly I was just in a conversation about this. Like, all these police forces, basically all the ones in the world, are modeled off of the London metropolitan police. Which was, in turn, modeled after the way that England 'kept order' in the colonies. That SPECIFIC system started in the late 17th/early 18th century, and was how it was done basically until they left India.
So like, John Adams never met a cop. Thomas Jefferson never met a cop. But they did meet people who had the exact job descriptions cops do today. Adams specifically met a few of those people, specifically members of the 29th Worcester Regiment of Foot (now the Mercian Regiment under Lieutenant-General Ian Cave), when he served as their defense lawyer after they shot at a crowd of protestors, killing five people. The first one being Crispus Attucks, a half-black, half-indigenous man who was, at the time, not even one of the protestors.
As a result, Attucks is often considered one of the first Americans killed in the Revolutionary War.
In addition, this event and others like it, were what led to the 3rd Amendment of the United States Constitution. An amendment which is largely ignored... Because we came up with the idea of reclassifying our soldiers as 'Police.'
So like... Police Brutality: Literally older than America... And the police are probably themselves just straight-up unconstitutional.
Of the 500,000 interracial crimes committed in America each year, over 90% are committed by blacks against other races.
About 10 unarmed black men are killed by police every year.
Stats are racist
@@illuminahde
1) That has literally nothing to do with anything I said, did you mean to respond to someone else?
2) I notice you compared "Crimes" to "Murders". Murders, after all, specifically involves when you SUCCEED at killing someone. What about cases where the victim was shot, beaten, or otherwise attacked, but recovered?
3) And in fact, specifically "Murders of unarmed black men," a list which would not include people like Tamir Rice (12, considered "Armed" ) Aiyana Jones (7, female), or Breonna Taylor (female.)
4) How do you define an "Interracial crime?" You were very specific in that you were limiting the discussion of police killings to cases where the victim was
1: Unarmed.
2: Black.
3: Male.
4: Died.
But 'interracial crimes' is far more vague. For example, when Amy Cooper misused 911 to call the police and claim a man was harassing her when he clearly was not, was that an interracial crime? Some people would say yes. Amy Cooper was a white woman, Christian Cooper (no relation) was a black man. Other people would say no, because the crime was misusing 911, and thus the victim was the city of New York, which is a legal construct that does not have a race. Or how about if a Hispanic person shoplifts a cake from a Baskin Robbins franchise with an Indian owner. Is that an interracial crime? Well, some people could say yes, the Hispanic person stole from an Indian person. Others would say no, the Hispanic person stole from a store, and the store does not have a race.
What about cases where there's more than one perpetrator? Or more than one victim? When Elliot Rodger (British father, Chinese mother) killed his three roommates, was that two interracial crimes (Two were full Chinese) or is that all Asian-on-Asian violence?
What if a crime is committed with indiscriminate, multiple victims? For example, imagine if a half-black, half-hispanic man was evicted from my apartment building, and in anger committed arson, which lead to the deaths of myself, my girlfriend (hispanic), and a black couple (black)? Is that four interracial killings, because none of us are black-hispanic?
What if an officer of an institutional landlord company commits perjury in order to evict ten tenants from a building they own. If the person who signed the papers doesn't know the races of the people being falsely evicted, is that an interracial crime?
What if a fully black man gets in a fistfight with his half-black, half-indian half-brother, is that interracial? If a Japanese man kills a Chinese man, for racist reasons, do we NOT consider it interracial because they're both Asian?
Hell, is a dude keeping an exotic animal as a pet interracial? I mean, his race isn't "Lion," is it?
And while all of these questions are ones YOU might have an answer to, the question is whether the numbers you cited are going to have the same answer.
Which, again, would still only answer questions about that number, and not baout the fact that you are comparing "Killing of unarmed black men" to a list of crimes which can include anything from pickpockets to pedophiles.
I don't know about racist. But, to quote Mark Twain, there are three types of lies. Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.
@@HyenaDandy I get that you like to focus on the man bites dog story in the news but your anecdotal stories and hypothetical potential happenings fail to address the issue. When you speak about policing and violent interactions with the police you give black people no agency. As if resisting arrest and committing crimes is not an individual choice.
My point was 12.5% of the population does this and then finds it curious when the police recognize patterns. When is it ok to say it's a problem?
Your pattern recognition focuses on the exceptions that prove the rule.
The fact that you can't name as many white victims should cause you pause. Because there are many many many more victims.
That's why it's easy to see your concern for the black community is politically motivated. That's fine but rich kids shouldn't tell poor families about reducing crime by defunding the police.
P.S. there were more than a dozen white kids shot by police with toy guns while you read about Tamir Rice. Bad parents come in all races.
@@HyenaDandy Oh, Mark Twain also wrote about a guy named ngr Jim so let's quote someone else please.
Since you seem to question the numbers, African American men make up about 6% of the population and are responsible for over 50% of the murders. That's why I used the specific framing I did. It's not numerology.
@@samiam884 type in FBI crime statistics.
I could have broken down by age as well for you. As in, black men between the ages of 13 and 30 are about 4% of the population yet commit over 50% of the murder. (I'm simply using murder but you can use any violent crime, including sexual assaults)
If you commit more crimes then you have more interactions with police. It's simple. Covering your eyes doesn't make this topic go away and treating black people with no agency is the Real racism.
As a person with alopecia, I really appreciate your sense of humor about the condition. I actually think it makes you look more unique and stand out more as a person.
@Vesta _The_Lesser It's alopecia areata.
As a person who suffered from stress induced alopecia from the age of 10. Im so glad that stage of my life is over.
I love how the main scumbag cop character is the punisher
Have to say its pretty interesting that Berenthal took this role considering that you can find him posing next to Punisher skulls with the thin blue line on them, and at NY Comic Con I believe he even talked about how he was excited to play the character because of how much the Punisher meant to law enforcement. Maybe after 2020 he did some reflection.
@@galactic85 he might just be a bootlicker, tho
@@galactic85 he's a cop bootlicker but he occasionally says some based stuff but then also goes on joe rogan and says he has no idea what toxic masculinity is , when he played shayne on the walking dead lmao
@@darthekul1 says the commie bootlicker.
@@Al-ji4gd projection much lmao and did u already delete ur dumb comment lol
"it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of police"
"It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of Capitalism."
@@Hopperton yes that's the quote I was adapting to policing
"it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of jealousy"
@@noisegrrrl the quote marks should end at OF :)
It's crazy how us Americans think we're a dynamic, innovative, and creative people but are terrified of even the most minor changes
It's always funny how cities have to pull funding from other programs to cover the costs of police reform, despite most PDs being grossly over funded to begin with.
It's because most of the police department's budget is spent on buying military grade hardware so their corrupt cops can also be a corrupt paramilitaty organisation
Lifelong Baltimorean. My neighborhood was terrorized by Hersl & the Gun Trace Task Force. My childhood friend was sent to prison for literally years until the DEA investigation revealed the depths these guys were mining, morally. They are not an anomaly; they are the norm, not the exception. Some people can afford to lie to themselves about the police, but even those people are only one encounter away from seeing the truth. The sad fact is that the people who defend the police in these types of debates are just as vulnerable to being preyed upon by the police as anyone else.
"Anyone over 18 carrying a backpack meant they were carrying guns or drugs" - Theory from a Baltimore cop.
I live in Baltimore county and I go around Baltimore city to different parts for my work. I work in IT and I carry a backpack with a laptop and various IT supplies and tools. I am well over 18.
It is absolutely horrifying to think about. Then again I have the advantage that I might not have "Seemed the type". Like there was something about me that might not have me tagged as a possible suspect.
I'm white. And hearing about this, if some of my colleagues had done the same, they might have been victimized by that man or his cronies. Because they are not.
Also the right to bear arms implies that it shouldn't be a problem to carry guns in your backpack. Cops don't like that they lack a monopoly on guns i guess.
@Rex Appleby I've always found that so weird. In a country where it is not only legal but encouraged to bare arms, a cop can murder you for carrying one.
@@rexappleby4731 Literally, yes. Most folks in America who claim to support the 2nd are fucking lying to you - What they actually support is the right for neurotypical financially comfortable white people to own guns, and nothing else.
The cop is right in certain way. That is how it is done. Idk about I in the USA, but in my country, I was told by a "person with knowledge" that cops are somehow very good in figuring out when a person with backpack carries something, though cops are the top professionals here.
It reminds me of a quote from one of the conservative MPs in the UK, essentially "anyone whose curtains aren't open by 8am are lazy, unemployed and scrimping off of the government". Something to that effect.
It just shows how tone deaf they are to reality, plenty of people carry backpacks. And plenty of people work night shifts or evening shifts. We are ruled and controlled by people who lack any understanding of what it means to be us.
Funny that Ed Burns, the ex-cop, is actually more clear-eyed about this shit than Simon.
You can kind of tell from season 5 of The Wire that Simon kind of _wants_ to be a homicide detective, that he wants to see a certain similarity between the detectives and the journos who cover crime. Maybe that's part of why he's so biased on this.
Yes he absolutely fetishizes the "natural police trope." He even defended some of the national security States data surveillance methods citing its utility in city law enforcement. The wire is the best show ever but David Simon has a huge blind-spot. And he does not respond to criticism well.
You're a clueless cop hating child
I hate the fact that Copaganda isn't one of the biggest video essay series on the platform. This shit has been and continues to be great
I got in an argument with someone who characterized bread tube as "white ppl with privilege telling poor ppl they don't need to work" all I could do was laugh at them, knowing they watch Chicago p.d literally every night.
@@TheNewblade1 I mean they're not entirely wrong, most of bread tube is indeed white people with privilege spouting off about things to virtue signal rather than actually doing something meaningful.
It's not much different from being a Twitter activist.
That's because it's.....not very good. It's kind of silly actually.
@@LordVader1094 At least they're TRYING! I think u SEVERELY undervalue the power in EDUCATING. 💯 Wtf r YOU doin?! God, I HATE that ppl like u even exist!! Ppl like u r who the Matrix warned about... "U have to understand, most of these ppl r not ready 2 b unplugged. And many of them r so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."
It's extremely popular
David Simon is nostalgic about Baltimore police in the old days? Does he know how much the KKK was represented in Baltimore police back in the day?
And I know a guy who was charged and convicted of murder at age 17, in the early 70s, and given life without parole. He spent 40 years in the Maryland pen. He had signed a confession after the cops threatened to throw him out the window. The information in the confession was completely wrong - even the site of the crime was wrong. There was no physical evidence tying him to the murder. He was only released after fighting the conviction for decades. But instead of exonerating him, the state's attorney forced him to sign an agreement giving up the right to demand compensation. Technically he's still a convict - but they all know he's innocent. His name is Jesse Barnes.
The cops are all scum.
You mention that The Wire is a work of fiction, but as you point out David Simon worked for the Baltimore Sun for a dozen years. His co-creator Ed Burns had worked both as a public school teacher and a detective in the Homicide and Narcotics divisions. A lot of the characters in The Wire were based on real people and I'm sure a lot of the incidents depicted in The Wire were based on actual events.
I find it interesting that videogames generally represent cops in the extreme alternative, usually as antagonists or totalitarian foot-soldiers. Even in something like L.A. Noir, the cops are corrupt and antagonistic, of course, this is because it's more practical and fun for the players, but more often than not, story-wise, a powerful police-force oppresses and kills. See The Last of Us, GTA V, Dishonored, Bioshock, Batman, Assassin's Creed, Saints Row, Need for Speed, Left 4 Dead etc.
wait, left for dead? i don't remember if there's even cop zombies. there's the riot zombies which i guess counts but listing it in all these games like they're even distinct gameplay or character-wise is kinda absurd.
@disposable_income_andy it's environmental, you go through camps and read some of the guidelines as things become more drastic.
The last of us had very very little tradition policing unless of your referring to the first 15 min when they are overwhelmed. I would certainly not consider FEDRA any type of American policing
@@disposable_income_andyI think it's referring to the military (??) and not really the cop zombies
I think that probably stems from the desire for freedom in games. Police restrict freedoms, so they become enemies
I read both “We Own This City” and “I Caught A Monster”. Also watched the show in laymans terms “Baltimore Is Still Fucked”
Police are a hammer, and whilst hammers are an important part of a toolset, they are not the whole toolset. Swinging bigger and bigger hammers everytime the hammer fails to fix something will only cause more damage.
You're a clueless cop hating child
"When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail"
This is where "results" driven policing can also work against itself. If defunded they will %100 cut away parts that are producing the lowest results. Which means that the parts that "cut corners" and "lie" to get the best results are highly likely to avoid scrutiny and remain within the department preventing any new policies from taking hold and insuring the greatest resistance to positive change.
In France, we had our own "gun trace task force scandal" somwhere in the early 2010, with the infamous BAC nord of Marseille. Police agent from a Brigade Anti-Criminalité (Anti-Crime Brigade), a type plain clothe unit tasked to catch flagrant crime. The whole case went nowhere and the story even got adapted into a movie, that portrayed the cops as some sort of tragic rogues heroes that had to bend the rules to catch some big drug dealer. The contrast between "we own this city" and "BAC nord" has always been something I found quite interresting.
In Belgium you could fill a library with scandals involving the now defunct gendarmerie. Going all the way back to Congo (Lumumba's murder par exemple) and GLADIO
Entertainment media does this a lot. The NYPD has had multiple huge corruption scandals . With bribery being the norm add police officers to did not want to take bribes fearing for their lives. The movie serpico details a big one. New York City then sets of commissions take me to clean out the crime.
Law & order touched on this a couple of times. Each time they've made the head of the commission look like an a****** politician.. he wasn't by the way.. despite the fact that in one of them he was going after a cop who literally set up an execution. Look at the list of movies available to you.. the vast majority have a detective as the protagonist
I tried so hard to understand what a consent decree was when I watched the show but I just couldn't figure out what they were talking about. I'm glad you've finally explained it.
Google..maybe🥴
Glad to hear that! It was my job to explain it. Problem with We Own This City was they wanted to get into all the important details as little as possible in order to reach the widest possible audience. The cost was not really showing what happened and focusing on the officers (or a few of them) getting held accountable -- but that really wasn't the story, at all. The DOJ got sandbagged because of Trump and Sessions, and Baltimore didn't get any police reform work. Now, the police unions are more powerful than ever -- even with the Biden DOJ using the old Obama civil rights people. Basically, Biden has stayed away from the police reform issue.
He didn't actually explain it correctly. He explained what one was in this very narrow context, but consent decrees are also used in disciplinary hearings before professional boards and in family law. It's not exclusively federal. The details of child custody are often outlined in a consent decree, and child custody orders are always made at the state level, as are all legal decisions pertaining to family law. I guess a good definition of it would be "a court order used as a form of dispute resolution, signed by a judge and the parties to the dispute, and enforced by the court." Violation of a consent decree results in contempt hearings and/or reconsideration of the case. It's not a contract in the traditional sense because there's no consideration (legal term), but it resembles one. That's the best I can come up with off the top of my head right now at this late hour.
Actually addressing this issue means addressing the failures and societal excesses of capitalism hence why they keep looking to cops as the solution.
Plus, cops number one function is essentially to protect the property rights of wealthy. Evictions, crushing protest, herding houseless people away from wealthy power brokers
Sadly
I think David Simon is nostalgic for the days when the percentage for homicide clearance rates was in the 70’s and 80’s pre-drug war, and when cops had a basic skill set for investigating violent crimes.
Except that time has NEVER EXISTED in US history. That's the point that Jackson is making. He knows what Simon is alluding too, but the problem is that David Simon is nostalgic for a time that is a complete fiction. Investigation skills are and always have been fundamentally flawed. There is a reason that news stories come out every year about someone who was locked up for decades being cleared by DNA evidence. The 1970's comes in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights movement. In the 1960's police were cracking down on the Civil Rights movement. Even if they had good skills for solving violent crimes there is now way they were applying those skills universally. There is no way that in a time of legal segregation the police were devoting the same amount of resources to solving the murders of someone who was black and someone who was white.
It's a shame he's seemingly incapable of grasping the fact that they still disproportionately terrorised minority communities in those days too, it wasn't idyllic
This show is an upsetting but important criticism of the lackadaisical reform mechanisms we have at the moment
Asking the police to reform itself is like asking the Mafia to reform itself.
To be fair, it's not like anyone else could reform police either, since police reform is a contradiction in terms. You can't reform something that is bad by design, because it's already functioning as intended.
The Mafia has reformed itself a few times and with a lot less violence, ironically enough.
@@samk522 Very true. I think law enforcement is bad by design because of the simple fact that legality doesn't, and never will determine morality.
And trusting police to investigate their own is like letting John Gotti pick his own jury.
@@samk522yes, you can because it can always be made good by design instead of bad by design. Even If it is functioning as intended, you can always change intention.
I love this series but goddamn, sometimes I have to watch new uploads in parts because it all just gets me so mad, makes it hard to work on a monday afternoon lmao
it’s true and why i probably can’t even watch we own this city, but something about the way skip intro presents it doesn’t trigger me the same way say, watching the news or john oliver does. skip is chill and presents so matter-of-factly, it soothes as it enrages lol.
Cope and seethe
@@jaydenshepard7928 I: You're the one seething here
one of my favorite things about the wire was that even the cops u liked did their dirt. It showed that their system enables the worst people no matter the situation. Thats why its confusing seeing simon say he dont want to defund the police. How can you misunderstand the purpose and you seen the evidence?
Because he wants to misunderstand. He's too attached to his socially-conditioned, romanticized image of police to understand it's something that never existed and never can. His life's work is based as much in worship of this fictional "good cop" as it is in seeing the evil that cops actually do.
Cuz he’s not actually for reforming the police. It’s all just talk to save face with his larger audience that don’t like cops.
Cause he’s Hollywood. Almost every single one of these “social critic” celebrities are doing it for ulterior motives
Cause defunding the police is retarded. Like let's say you want better roads so you're going to defund public construction, does that make sense? If you want to improve standards, wouldn't you want to fund the police more to hire better talent, improve training and get rid of the troublemakers?
@@songcramp66 Using your analogy it would be more like we want better roads but the taxes we pay for better roads or being misused after constant years of increasing budget and improving training to no avail. So instead of continuing to fund mistakes we decide to reallocate funds from that public construction department to a department specifically designed to construct on streets instead overall construction in the city.
The problem with what u said is you left the context of how we got to this point and framed as people waking up one morning and saying take all the money away and thats not the case at all. This was a build up and police has failed at almost every turn with corruption plaguing almost every department in america and thats not an exaggeration
Take away the police and look at it like this. If you fund a business as a angel donor and constantly it fails, wouldnt you move your money around to a better situation? Thats all de-funding does
When you took your hat off my feeling of the world f'ing me eleviated. Last year when i was 26 i randomly started losing my hair. It was reall bad. I stopped going out except for work. Going to get my hair cut was... just the worse. I had longish hair and man it was just bad. Its been a little under a year since it started and it has started growing back. Before i knew it would come back i really excepted some truths. My wife will always love me, i will always love me and the people who took the time to notice i had just disappeared are so appreciated. My hair started growing back in different colors and people think its cool. I dont. It just reminds me of all the places i had no hair. Fuck it sucked man and hope you get yours back but even more than that i hope your ok. It took some fucking courage to share with your audience and i thank you. Thanks.
I just can't believe there are police unions while there are no more unions anywhere else.
They're union in name, but in reality they're anti-unions
It's about power. And who has it.
Not so fun fact if you ever get a good look at the Shoulder Patch used by the Montana Highway Patrol you’ll notice at the bottom of the patch 3-7-77.
The number is a lynching call sign that was infamously pinned to the chest of Frank Little when he was lynched by the Butte City PD.
And yet some still claim the US isn't outright fascist...
I'd argue that the negative effects of the war on drugs were the reasons it was started. Maybe its a bit conspiritorial but I think mass incarceration of people of color and the empowerment and militarization of the police were the goals way more than solving any drug crisis. It's why it's still going despite not achieving its goals or even making any real progress. As always the cruelty (and the racism) is the point.
I’m an ex cop, and you’re right on the money.
Yeah. Nixon and his cronies were blatant about it.
That's just an objective fact
What I think kills me is the idea that the person sent by the justice department doesn't know about testilying and is caught off guard by this whole affair. It's like lady, I get why I might not have known in 2013, but you're the long arm of the law sent here to handle this problem and yet you don't know about one of the most basic tools that police use to continue their behavior. It's like, becoming the head of nintendo after years of studying games and arguing that you are one of the most knowledgeable devs in the industry and then saying you don't know wtf Super Mario is.
It makes a stronger statement than ever that every part of this system is fucked, that it can perpetrate all this shit not only because the system allows it, but because those in charge are so disconnected from reality that they are completely unaware of the most basic aspects of it.
I don't think she was supposed to be supprised that it happens, but how obviously prevalant it was in Balitmore.
She's not a real person. She's showing the system to the audience surrogate.
I just started watching your Copaganda videos so I'm really glad to see this show up. I thought We Own This City was a very good and very important show, but it seems like not many people paid attention to it. Even the Emmy Awards somehow ignored Jon Bernthal's performance... though they usually ignore David Simon projects, which shows how out of touch they are.
great actor
You're one of the only creators who remembers it was "Abolish" before "Defund"
I'd love to see abolish the police realized. I want to live in Walking Dead world where soy boys like this creator become slaves to my militia band.
@@Darkpara1 You watched this entire video and still think abolish/defund means to get rid of completely? Something tells me your militia is gonna have a lot of issues.
You're a clueless cop hating child
@@TheDarkAdventure You're a clueless cop hating child
One time I got a traffic ticket for a rolling stop at a stop sign. I stopped at the sign and my view of traffic was blocked by a business sign, so I stopped then rolled up to a point I could see while still not being in traffic. Then I stopped again, and then went. I explained this to the cop ignored the truth and then went I fought the ticket they testified that what I said wasn't true. I took pictures of everything to prove that what I said was true and the cop was lying. The judge refused to even look at the photos. The cops word made the judge refuse to even listen to me.
So yeah, the cops are full of shit and I will always vote in a jury for any non-violent crime defendants. Cops always lie, and that is just the tip of what I have experienced with police.
With the quote regarding NYC, there was a major reduction in cops during the time due to Covid, BLM and Defund the Police. NYC also has an issue with the DA's not prosecuting actual crimes that aren't minor possession charges causing Police not to enforce laws anymore.
I disagree on only one thing, Simon does not portray them as ‘regular joes’, he portrays them as greedy and entitled. Wayne gets hung up on the size of his crabs or lobsters for gods sake, seafood is already seen as an expensive delicacy. It shows he can already afford nice things, he just wants more. He gave off ‘daddy got me a BMW but I wanted the Range Rover’
To be fair to his view of the war on drugs timeline; the effects and militarization that the war on drugs ended up funding took time to spin up in different areas. To also be fair, he should have been a part of it throughout most of his career.
I think Defund the police policies are really interesting ideas. Except. Social Workers can't replace police officers because social work is also super, super corrupt. I have a lot of friends and acquaintances who burned out of social work convinced that they were doing more harm than good. One friend watched a colleague commit multiple felonies without batting an eye. She was caught, but only for one crime. Policing is horrific. And Social Work is barely, barely functional. Not even sure what would help at this point.
Policies that actually focus on crime prevention. If we made it a point to get rid of poverty that's a huge chunk of crime that is reduced. Free school lunches. Expanded maternity leave and pay. Free or reduced child care expenses. A dramatic increase of housing supply in major cities, more robust public transit services, free Healthcare, reestablishing mental health services, finding a better way to fund schools, raise min wage, reinstate maximum income, restructuring the foster care/child protection service. You know instead of paying foster parents to take care of kids with bio parents who are struggling, we can pay the bio parents.
All of this will help defund the police and give them a significantly reduced role and we can fund social work and provide more resources so they are not overworked and underpaid. But ultimately the goal is to reduce or eliminate both of their jobs.
A Cop by any other name...
Social work may be corrupted, but it's not innately so. The police, as an institution, are inherently bad for society. There's no "corrupting" police because the job is oppressive and harmful by definition. Social work can be cleaned up, made more functional. Policing can't be.
@@samk522 what’s your proposed solution?
@@Playaboy5 Abolition is the only real solution. Our entire concept of "law enforcement" needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. What the new system looks like specifically is a large topic with a lot of room for variation, but the central point is that the institution we think of as "policing" needs to be done away with, not just reformed.
John Oliver's law and order episode would fun to see you watch... he basically went over how forced interrogation happens and how the police watch SVU and those shows to get their information.🤣
Another banger vid, this copaganda series brings a lot of emotions out but it’s vital info to share.
Jon Bernthal should have gotten an Emmy for this show
His Bawlmer accent is so damn good. Such a convincing rust belt asshole. He’s a DC native so I guess that’s where it comes from
Have you watched Kavernacle's video on Jon Bernthal?He's probably pro-Police.I'm not sure.
Missing the point by a country mile
Jon Bernthal should get an Emmy for just existing
He needs like 4
This was by far my favorite entry of the copoganda series. You did a great job of providing different perspectives and reasoning for both sides. I really appreciate the interviews as well. I love the symmetry of the video starting and ending with the same clip. Fantastic video and very thought provoking
At 22:40 ,I live in Brooklyn ny and that story reminds me of the time I had to serve in a grand jury for two weeks to hand out grand jury indictments. One of those cases, a disabled black woman was being charged with possession of an illegal firearm , possession of a dangerous weapon and some other charge because they found a gun in her apartment in the closet. Now grand juries are really weird because there’s rules as a juror you have to follow and the main one is that you can only make indictments based on the evidence presented by prosecutors and defense testimony if there was any. It lacked any nuance as to why certain things happened and what led to certain actions.
I’m this case, the cops just randomly knocked on her door to check to see if anything was going on because “they heard banging and yelling earlier and the day before. We weren’t given probable cause for even approaching that door or even reasons to why that door was being targeted. They just appeared there and that’s all we had to go off of. And then disabled woman answered the door, they said she let them in to search on her own accord, and they searched the entire apartment and found a bag of three guns buried in the closet and arrested her. The prosecutors left, because they can always bring more evidence and info later on. They came back the next day saying that the reason they were at that door was because they had a warrant for an arrest of guy who lived there, which happened to be her cousin who according to the woman in her testimony, had let stay there for a few weeks. She said she had no idea that the guns were there and that she kicked him out of the apartment days prior to the cops coming in and searching the apt.
She had no history with the police before and was disabled with two kids of her own who stayed with her on the weekends. We weren’t allowed to hear or take on account those facts because they were related to the facts of the case. The facts were that the guns were in her apartment and that by law we had to make the ruling based on that evidence.
I remember how dirty it felt making that decision because a lot of us felt pigeonholed into that outcome. I didn’t think she deserved 3 felony charges at all. And it isn’t a unanimous decision , it’s a majority rules thing. That’s why the saying is “if prosecutors really wanted to, they can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich”. It’s so skewed and disgusting. I used to hear about grand jury indictments coming down on ppl, and thought, well, this was legit. Or hearing how prosecutors couldn’t get grand juries to indict cops being corrupt or behaving horribly. And now I see, it’s all fucking collusion. Funny thing is, even if we didn’t give the “true bill” indictment, the prosecutors could still continue to prosecute these individuals regardless. And I’m like, what is the point of keeping us in this room for 8 -10 hours 5 days a week listening to these cases???
I dont understand how cops quitting would result in more crime when cops report all the crime statistics. And didnt cops walk in NYC one time and the opposite affect happened where crime went down?
I already watched it on nebula this morning but now that I’m fully awake I’ll watch it again here
Regarding crime rates "increasing after defunding the police", it's also useful to consider that crime rates are based on arrests made by the police. In many situations, increased crime rate actually means increasing policing rate. The police decide to punish a community by going on an arrest spree, it is then reported as higher crime rates.
They'll create a crime then punish someone else. "Oh, someone disrespected me? Smash their tail light and arrest them for it" kind of actions
Policing and Captalism. Line (arrest numbers) must always go up. Fuck who we hurt to do so
you hit an important point. police need "crime" to justify their budgets. so they will always find ways to create "crime"
The policing stats chase has nothing to do with capitalism. It is entirely a government institution. It has to do with being able to show the voters "good stats" so that judges, DAs, and mayors can boost their political career.
@@Schrodinger_ Policing has to pump the stats. Capitalism has to bump the numbers. I wasnt connecting the two directly, simply illuminating a trend in which trying to create something out of nothing results in harming the weakest people.
@@WizWiteKnight you hit the nail on the head, the issue with government programs is funding is determined by statistical change and not real added value much like modern wall street driven capitalism. Lots of smoke and mirrors.
@@Schrodinger_ most intelligent liberal
Teach a group of society that they can lie openly, but never be lied to themselves....
Why did anyone think there could ever be an 'honest cop' outcome?
I had Professor Brunson last semester and we got very close. Telling me I will do great things. However, he does push back against socialism when I did bring It up in class discussion or privately. Great professor
Stumbled upon your channel lately and have been loving your informative and, I think, fair view point from the actual center of the issue. Great job with every video I’ve seen so far.
The one thing this show portrayed so excellency is how absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s sounds cliche, and it is, but it’s sooooo true
Regarding the whole Simon vs Abolitionists bit, I think it shows the catch-22 of the defund movement: it's a terrible slogan for such a complex issue. Just look at how much the public in the US has 180'd on the issue in the last two years alone. Sure, it was driven in part by conservative firebrands stoking a moral panic, but a lot of the calls against defunding came from minority communities themselves. The calls were especially loud among asian communities, who were experiencing a massive wave of hate crimes, and black communities themselves, who were caught in the crime spike post-covid. Sure, we can debate the systemic causes of that, but those communities probably won't see that as anything more than platitudes. Heck, in Minneapolis, we saw a defund-backed initiative to change the MPD go down in smoke because of opposition from black voters, as well as Jacob Frey getting re-elected. For twitter abolitionists to be taken seriously, they need to do a better job navigating the issue with some nuance and divorce the system from the people working and living under it. Otherwise, it'll just be one step forward and two steps back over and over again.
Also you can not cancel a system like the war on drugs and replace it with social programs and expect overnight results.
And cancellation of the war on drugs is the biggest cost cutting measure you can do.
I have seen the change in crime statistics after adding youth centres and etc. But all of this is long term.
There's no utopian past and no utopian future. It's always messy. But we can definitely do better and learn.
The whole point of the “terrible slogan” is to get you to talk about this. Also, you should engage with actual abolitionists in-person where you live. Online comments only go so far.
@@selalewis9189 lmao I live in New York and nearly all of the PoC that live near me are decidedly NOT for abolition. Kinda telling that white people want police gone and PoC who are more likely to be victims of crime aren't. Also it doesn't matter if the reason is to get people to talk about it when all they're saying is either how terrible it is or conservative propaganda. You've poisoned the movement before it even began if you do that.
Fucking stupid internet leftists...
@@selalewis9189 Your average joe isn't going to see a terrible, or any, slogan and go 'oh, i wonder what they really mean'. They're going to have a kneejerk reaction because slogans are meant to short-circuit your reasoning. Slogans are often a person's first interaction with your idea, so it needs to give the right impression so they're amenable to further conversation. You have a terrible slogan and nobody is gonna want to talk to you. You're not gonna want to have a conversation with a movement whose slogan is 'down with the blacks' even if it turns out that they're talking about the east asian concept of a 'black company'.
(Edit: edited to restate my point in a better way)
I wonder if this series could cover Disco Elysium. Even if it's not TV/Movie, lot of interesting things to say about policing in that game.
Just starting this but this show was great, glad I got my dad to watch it with me haha
A is your dad a cop supporting conservative or a victim of police brutality who feels that his voice is not heard
Living in LA through the Rodney King Riots through the post-Rampart Reforms I can confirm that the LAPD has definitely changed in town. They don't roam the city like a uniformed street gang anymore, but there are still leaving behind a fairly high body count.
I remember when Adam & Eve sponsored a ton of videos from creators I enjoyed for a while. It’s interesting to see them doing it again.
15:50 - This is a real problem. For a very brief moment in the BPD post Freddie Gray, the cops got out of their patrol cars and did foot patrols. Then that went totally tits up as cops refused to work OT, left for the counties, and performed an Italian strike. Aka: they went AWOL. It was bad enough that when I was robbed afterwards, the detective who took my case was one of two people working as a detective for the whole station (there should have been 8-10.)
Now in my other anecdote with BPD, they caught the guys, but I literally had 911 on the phone during the B&E and had a video of them that was only a few minutes old by the time they arrived.
I got into your series two months ago and I thought man I wish he'd do a We Own this city episode after the The Shield one. My prayers have been answered!
Something that makes sweeping police reform hard that almost nobody talks about is the uniquely decentralized nature of police in the US. No other country has thousands of different police agencies where most officers are trained by and work for a local municipality. Everywhere else either has most police organized on a national level or by state/province, and this means they have broader tax funding, consistent and longer training, and standards enforced by a simplified oversight system (rather than thousands in the US as each department investigates themselves). Where I live, there are two departments with overlapping jurisdictions that are radically different in how they operate (thanks to completely different training and culture), and people will check their shoulder patch before interacting with them. Saying something like "police budgets are bloated" is oversimplifying to an absurd degree since there are nearly 20,000 different agencies, many of them funded exclusively by poor communities.
Seeing characters and hearing a line from the wire is so nostalgic. Just finished my 2nd watch through 2 days ago
I really think people should lie about having bad experiences with cops, if asked, when being considered for Jury 'duty'.
Seriously, if you care about justice for your fellow citizens, LIE...and do not play into their scheme, they are trying to remove people who might actually question police departments/ the authorities.
If it's something else? If you're called for a murder trial, and you've had someone close to you murdered, then sure, let them know.
I binged watched a ton of your videos over the last few days, just wanna say you are doing good stuff.
This vid put me on We Own This City fr fr. I was reminded of The Place Beyond the Pines. Would be so excited if you covered police in film too!
Hey, great video, as always! Thanks for the educating bit about consent decrees, I need to read about them more. Some points below:
If you view the police as another gang then you really should extend the class analysis benefit (low means pushes people to crime & vice versa) to police as well. Ironically, it even supports the DS argument from his Twitter rant - if you get a formation that practically advertises themselves as 'violence privilege without repercussions' then sure as hell it will attract some protofascists and sociopaths looking for violent release.
This probably is connected to your discomfort when you see scenes showing relatable moments from police officers' lives. We could of course portray them with more dehumanizing means but that would be missing the point completely. Just as in The Wire, the point is to show people entangled within the system which basically railroads their actions. Dehumanizing them is similar to saying that Third Reich citizens were just all evil monsters and while it may make us feel good in the short run, in the long run it's going to make us blind to what exactly is causing the systemic issue in the first place. You could even argue that this is basically essentialism and that shit's conservative af. My personal reading is that DS shows the human side of the officers not for asking us to be lenient but to be aware of the whole picture. Your dad / uncle / grandfather could be a great person in your home (although domestic violence stats say otherwise...) but a complete piece of shit in work.
This systemic approach also translates to the next point which is 'The Wire' not showing activists enough. While I generally agree with this, I suppose it comes from the notion that the whole framework needs to change, otherwise the best activists will be just more meat in the grinder. Unless it will be the scale of civil rights movement from the sixties. And I think it's fair to say that what point of view was missed in 'The Wire' was at least better shown in 'We Own This City'. In the end, I think DS writes what he knows best and that is the police.
And about DS not liking prison abolitionists, it's more like DS does not believe in idea of complete abolition at the end of this road. You can agree or disagree about this but even if you read his Twitter rant & responses, he basically agrees about defunding / rechanneling the funds of the police just as much as Burns does. True, he was being a a bit of dick about it in a 'old man yells at cloud' vibe but have you seen people that were tweeting at him, that's some prime toxic cesspit that had entirely discouraged me from using Twitter at one point.
All in all, I am under a strong impression that you both agree about that is the desired outcome, considering the reality of the reform.
It would be 100x easier to decriminalize drugs that it would be to abolish policing……but neither will ever happen.
You'd be surprised. Drug legislation, just like gun legislation, changes by statewide efforts. Don't worry about the fed, theyll change when the state's change. Look at Colorado.
Ireland's police force, An Garda Siochana (The Guardians of the Peace) or more colloquially referred to as 'the guards' are largely unarmed. Today guns are for the most part illegal in Ireland, but the guards were created right in the middle of a civil war when the country was awash with them. Obviously completely outlawing private ownership of firearms in the states would be a pretty radical idea, but I think that it's worth considering. There were 39 murders in Ireland in 2021. Compare this to nearly 350 in Baltimore alone during the same time period. Guns obviously aren't the only factor at play here. Ireland is one of the most well educated countries in the world, and has a decent social welfare system (depending on who you ask at least), but I think that taking guns out of the equation, for both police and citizens would have a marked effect on both crime rates and the ability of the police to act out of line.
There are only two responses to evil: anihilation and complicity.
Well goddamn boy, I didn't know we had super video essayist here. And a goddamn brick!!!
It’s not defund the police, it’s fund the community. This funding should be partially reallocated from police funding. And police should be relieved of doing work they are not equipped to do and shouldn’t be doing.
When you talk about Cops being the fist of capital, I kept thinking you were going to do a callback to the 50 Shades scene of negotiating about fisting.
My main problem with the defund the police movement is that it wouldn't solve the problem. Police NEED the money they have. They NEED to be using it in an entirely different way. They need to be using it to pay for hundreds if not thousands of hours of training that isnt implemented or required right now. They need that money to adequately pay for mental health screening and administrators for proper and more in depth background checks (cloeser to whats required for dod certifications) so that we dont have problematic people being hired into the departments. The problem isn't the amount of money they receive, its how they're allowed to use it. It shouldn't be used on new fancy guns, drones, and dozens of other unnecessary forms of technology.
These small numbers of high-risk offenders with disproportional amount of crimes, they are always well known by the police. One could say they are best buddies by now.
One aspect that always pokes me in the eyes of "knife attacks" and "terror attacks" those perps were well known by the police and other state agencies and they "neglected their duty" or even helped them get to their destination.
The balls on you to critique the creator of The Wire on police reform.
Bravo, hell of a video.
It would be interesting to see his channel tackle, in my opinion, one of the biggest copaganda show "The Closer" and "Major Crimes". With the lead character being ex-CIA interrogator who got the nickname "The Closer" for her ability to "close" the case by any means necessary.
The way these shows differentiate between homicide cops and drug cops reminds me of Columbo. They share that cadence of "Woah, hey, he's a cop, but he's not an UNLIKEABLE cop! He's going for the REAL bad guys! Here, watch him let this prostitute go. He doesn't even brutalize the suspects! Isn't he such a kind, lovable shmuck?" And, yes, Columbo IS very lovable, but he's still representative of the prison system's (if idealized) core values: A crime demands punishment, and it is a cop's duty to stop at nothing to administer it. Columbo harasses and bothers; he pushes the boundaries of his suspects to just the point before illegality. And they're rich bastards, so it feels good, but maybe.... it's still copaganda. Whoops.
What’s fucked up is I started watching this show just thinking it was a sequel to the wire and had no idea the events were based on a real story. It wasn’t until they started getting really specific with that one Sean Suiter who died the day before the trial.
I would LOVE to see an episode on Sons of Anarchy because the way they treat cops as so interesting when thinking about it in this context.
This series is so good, I hope you do end up discussing true detective at some point
Thanks for this vid -- I think this is your best one in the series. Following up on your last point, it would be really good to see you take on a show that's about activists or community leaders so that the focus isn't on cops. I don't actually know of any shows like that though.... would love a recommendation if you or anyone else happen to know of a good one.
Essentially, can we defund the copaganda
Other countries have police forces that don't constantly murder their own citizens. I don't know how to get from here to there. Maybe it will take firing every currently serving cop and restarting each department from the ground up. But there is a better way out there.
The entire cast did excellent work.
Great video! Always looking forward to the next copaganda installment! As re-explained to me recently, you're not going to convince a majority of people to defund (or even imagine abolition) until the societal work is done to change our relation to capital. Due to white supremacy and capitalism being tied together, the protection of property comes before human life, especially the lives of black people and other POC (and those who don't ascribe to whiteness). You're not going to get change from a liberal legal system that tries to reform an institution founded on slave catching and union busting. So investment in people through social programs for housing, healthcare, and education would alleviate the fear of increasing crime and total anarchy.
I: Agreed. But please don't perpetuate the conflation of "anarchy" with "utter chaos". Anarchism is a specific polititcal and philosophical thought (forgot the proper term), and using "anarchy" to mean chaos (while in fact, anarchism is about scrutinizing and dismantling unjust hierarchies) stigmatizes anarchists
Boston actually is an example of how private community activists failed, and how necessary it is for the government to intervene in providing social services.
Reverend Eugene Rivers was (and still is) a con-man who through violence and intimidation (including to other reverends to have the monopoly of access to murder victims’ families…) got a monopoly on grants to the inner city violence and used it to enrich himself.
I’m a documentary filmmaker and the issue on the ground is really really complex. The police is definitely structured awfully, and the prison system is actively recruiting neo-nazis. But we can’t either run blindly into ideal solutions which sound fantastic in theory (“charities will save us”) but can turn out disastrously in practice.
Not to be too commie, but the government needs to step in, increase taxes, and provide additional social benefits to at least reach the level of the bottom quarter of developed nations.
I love this. He not only talks about how something can work and has worked, but slowly picks at its flaws and shows that it isn’t perfect and can backfire.
In my opinion, we need police for the police. Truly make them accountable and put more funding into training. The reason bad cops stay bad cops is cause there are no consequences
No wonder he hates cops, mans is dressed like the Hamburgler in those interviews! lmao.
When it comes to police in America, there’s only a Black view, and a White view. No one else’s view count if you’re in between. That’s just facts. I wish the world could change but it’s still the same as it was since my great x8 grandmother was here and it’ll NEVER CHANGE. I accept the things I cannot change.
I love your videos. Always very informative.
While I'm sure you already planned on making this video, I'm gonna take a small amount of credit for suggesting it in the comments a while ago when I saw no one else speaking about it. Keep up the good work man I absolutely love this content
A reform I'd take is financial transparency. Showing how our tax dollars are spent would be the proof either side of reform would need, is it more effective to fund deterrents or alternatives? Best part, the numbers are already done and if their books have nothing to hide...
Dude you ALREADY have access to public budgets. Did you even try searching through your state's records?
An effective reform would include tearing down the concept of "qualified immunity" - the cops have had literal decades upon decades to prove that it's necessary. They failed. It's time to make them responsible for their crimes.
@@Hawk7886 anybody going to Target with a budget can tell you a budget and a receipt are two very different things. Paystubs, deposits, withdrawals, and donations are what I'd like to see. This conversation always stalls because emotions run high and then people get off subject. Numbers are numbers. Do funds have an impact on crime? The first question is always how to fund a reform. Receipts will find those funds through surpluses
@@dmarmartin I feel like transparency doesn't do much to help the issue when the ability to punish bad policing remains the same. We see what they're doing and spending the money on as is, but so what? They still own the city
@@mattmoy24 transparency can help by removing morality out of the conversation. Any budget meeting after will have to rely on facts and justify why a community's tax dollars will go towards anything other than the community itself. The cops and officials will have to tell their communities why the cops need cosmetic or discretionary funds over fixed roads, housing, or school supplies. I've never seen a cop car with chipped paint, a dent, or a scratch, and yet vagabonds and custom pickups are the norm. You don't need to look pretty to "catch bad guys"
32:44 Yes, thats 100% David Simon...the bad thing about it...he is absolutely right with this. It is a war against people, especially poor people, not against drugs.
I really appreciate this, especially after the Tyre Nichols murder. Thanks for the good content.
Can you add subtitles to your videos? I recently found you and love your content but my auditory processing issues makes it hard to understand what is being said at some times. Thanks!
40:47 You say "We Own this City is not critical of the police as a concept, as an institution" just after you show a clip of an activist talking about how the police hunt black people, and that new rules won't change that. Idk why you treat the police commissioner's opinion about the police needing more funding as the "show's opinion" but not the opinion of the activist. Seems like the show explains both perspectives without telling you which is right.
Wow. That was the best sponsored ad I've ever seen in a video.
Have you thought of exploring police in non-American media? I understand if it's no because you're more familiar with the American complex
Great work!