Show of military force fails to quell accusations of police overreaction

[james_davis_nicoll]

Nothing that happened in Ferguson, Missouri, on the fourth night since Michael Brown died at the hands of a police officer there, dispelled the notion that this is a place where law enforcement is capable of gross overreaction.

Comments

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

Late last year there were several news stories about the first fatal police shooting in Iceland, and how the country basically went into mourning and treated it like a massive societal failure. And on some discussion board that I was reading (I think it was Metafilter) people were comparing America and Iceland, and someone objected, saying "you can't compare America and Iceland! Iceland is much smaller! If you're comparing rates of police shootings and you want to be fair, you'd have to compare Iceland to... Portland, Oregon!"

And it was *so clear* that they'd given Portland as an example (as opposed to, say... St. Louis, which also has about the same population as Iceland) because they didn't actually know anything about the history of police violence in Portland, and just assumed, "well, Portland's mostly white, right? Mostly pretty liberal, lots of hippy dippy community policing, not a lot of racially motivated police brutality and/or unjustified shootings going on there? And surely if it happens the officers get fired, right?" .... Sure. Right. Totally.

Jason Sery, who killed (black, unarmed) James Jahar Perez during a traffic stop, was cleared of all charges and is currently a police officer in a suburb of Portland. Scott McCollister, who shot (black, unarmed) Kendra James during a traffic stop, was suspended for a few months, then exonerated & reinstated, with the suspension wiped from his record. Kyle Nice, Christopher Humphreys and Bret Barton, the three officers who beat (white & homeless) James Chasse Jr. to death, were never disciplined. Ron Frashour, who shot (white, mentally ill) Aaron Campbell while he was unarmed with his hands on his head, has been on *paid leave* for the past couple of years while the city fights with the police union to try to get him fired, and the police union tries to get him reinstated. And that's just the cases I know about from the last 10-15 years or so, the ones that got major media attention because they were *especially* egregious (and/or had multiple witnesses contradicting the official reports) and not so easily covered up.