Defund the police

[GMDino]

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/16/877527974/how-decades-of-bans-on-police-chokeholds-have-fallen-short#:~:text=The%20Los%20Angeles%20Police%20Department,officer's%20life%20is%20in%20danger.

Quote:Some of the biggest police departments in the country have already instituted bans on chokeholds. The Los Angeles Police Department banned what's called the "bar-arm chokehold" in 1982. The New York Police Department banned chokeholds in November 1993 — except when an officer's life is in danger. And the Chicago Police Department did the same in May 2012. Philadelphia and Houston have similar policies.


Las Vegas police Undersheriff Kevin McMahill speaks in Las Vegas on May 17, 2017, after the death of Tashii S. Brown, known as Tashii Farmer-Brown. Police had used a stun gun and a chokehold on him. In a change announced in September 2017, Las Vegas police officers can no longer routinely use neck restraints to render combative people unconscious.
John Locher/AP
And yet over the past two decades there have been multiple people who have died when neck restraints were used in their arrest.


Eric Garner, who died after being put in a chokehold by New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo, remains one of the most high-profile deaths.


But there are many others: James Thompson in Chicago. Allen Simpson in Dallas. Rodney Lynch in Gallup, N.M. Dustin Boone in Las Vegas. Roger Owensby Jr. in Cincinnati. Carl Glen Wheat in Amarillo, Texas. Gerald Arthur in New Orleans. Torris Harris in Chattanooga, Tenn.


In Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed and where chokeholds had been permitted until this month, the police used neck restraints at least 237 times since 2015 and rendered 44 people unconscious through the technique, according to a report by NBC.


Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor and author of the book Chokehold: Policing Black Men, says part of the problem is a lack of accountability.


"If we look at the ban in New York City, it's kind of like a rule in an employee handbook: 'Don't use a chokehold.' We shouldn't expect those kinds of light bans to work," he says.


In fact, when the city's Civilian Complaint Review Board studied its use in 2014, it found hundreds of complaints a year alleging that police officers used the technique — and even concluded that the use of chokeholds at the time appeared to be rising despite a decades-long ban.


"There is an enormous bias inside the police department when the police department is disciplining its own people to avoid diluting the power of any particular officer to use or employ a chokehold," says Richard Emery, who served as the chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board when it reviewed the use of chokeholds in New York City.

The article goes on to say that if it was a federal mandate maybe there could be some actual repercussions for officers, you know, killing people.