Tag: police brutality

yzarro:

bogleech:

cptsdhaver:

“Jim Cooper, a former LAPD officer turned sociologist, has observed that the overwhelming majority of those who end up getting beaten or otherwise brutalized by police turn out to be innocent of any crime. ‘Cops don’t beat up burglars,’ he writes. The reason, he explained, is simple: the one thing most guaranteed to provoke a violent reaction from the police is a challenge to their right to, as he puts it, ‘define the situation.’ That is, to say ‘no, this isn’t a possible crime situation, this is a citizen-who-pays-your-salary-walking-his-dog situation, so shove off,’ let alone the invariably disastrous, ‘wait, why are you handcuffing that guy? He didn’t do anything!’ It’s ‘talking back’ above all that inspires beat-downs, and that means challenging whatever administrative rubric has been applied by the officer’s discretionary judgment. The police truncheon is precisely the point where the state’s bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema and its monopoly on coercive force come together.”

— David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.  (via locusimperium)

One of the most common reasons ever given for arrest is “resisting arrest,” in other words people who weren’t found to have committed any other crime but are jailed and tried for arguing that very thing.

@we-are-rogue