12-02-2020, 10:09 PM
(12-02-2020, 09:33 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote:
Now hit me with your ambush, I'm sure it will be amusing.
Below I have quoted sections from a much longer article. I encourage anyone interested to read the entire piece.
What Can Mayors Do When the Police Stop Doing Their Jobs? — ProPublica
In the spring of 2015, the death of Freddie Gray, 25, from injuries sustained in police custody brought demonstrators into the streets of Baltimore. The protests flared into rioting and looting. Soon afterward, the city’s chief prosecutor announced criminal charges against the officers involved in the arrest. The officers’ colleagues responded by pulling back on the job, doing only the bare minimum in the following weeks. In the resulting void, crews seized new drug corners and settled old scores. Homicides surged to record levels and case-closure rates plunged. “The police stopped doing their jobs, and let people **** up other people,” Carl Stokes, a former Democratic city councilor in Baltimore, told me last year. “Period. End of story.”
The protests of recent months, which reignited again in August following the shooting of a man by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, as he leaned into his vehicle, have created real momentum for efforts to reform police departments. In many cities, though, rank-and-file police officers are greeting these efforts with an apparent pullback.
In Minneapolis, where the City Council approved legislation that would put up for referendum the wholesale replacement of the Police Department, residents have reported a notable decrease in police presence.
In Atlanta, many officers started calling in sick in reaction to the 11 charges, including felony murder, filed against Garrett Rolfe on June 17. The former Atlanta police officer shot and killed Rayshard Brooks. The interim police chief, Rodney Bryant, was left to plead with the officers on his force to do their job.
Some academics who have studied the phenomenon in recent years see evidence that rising rates of violence in cities that have experienced high-profile incidents of police brutality are driven by police pullbacks.
The shared recent experience of cities such as Baltimore, Atlanta, and Minneapolis points to one of the biggest challenges facing municipal leaders who are trying to hold police officers accountable for possible abuses of power and reform their police departments as a whole: the prospect that officers will pull back, staging a silent strike that, at best, leaves the city unable to contend with a spike in violence or, at worst, helps give rise to one.
“A lot of the onus for the violence falls right at the feet of law enforcement,” Gerald Griggs, the first vice president of the NAACP’s Atlanta branch, told the Post. “There are certain elements in our community that don’t take a break when the police take a break. You’re sworn to protect and defend, but when there are a few rogue [police] being held accountable you decide to shirk your responsibility?”
Federal investigations and de-policing did correlate with a sharp rise in violent crime in cities that had experienced what the study referred to as “viral” incidents: a high-profile, highly controversial instance of police using deadly force against a civilian — precisely what several cities are contending with today.
