*** The Official MAGAposting thread ***

[MadMojoMonkey]

It seems so. So why do these legal protections remain in place regardless of who's in power? Each case should be judged on its own merit, with precedent a guide and nothing more.

I'm guessing the answer to your first question is the separation of powers.
Once a bill gets through the 3 branches to become a law, it never goes away - unless another law passes which repeals the first law.

For anything that there's no law directly saying otherwise, if a court rules something, that precedent is tantamount to law - the precedents never go away, either.

Who's in power has almost no say over or ability to change what has been done before them.
POTUS can't unilaterally repeal laws of their predecessors - except they can change prior Presidential orders, which are like laws, but not laws.
The current congress still has to come to agreement to do anything and getting enough of them to agree to repeal a law is not a common thing that happens.

SCOTUS has this power, but a case has to make it through the system to them, they have to choose to hear it, and they have to rule against the precedent. This is called Judicial Activism - when the laws change due to appointed judges and not elected officials.

The history of Judicial Activism goes back to the first SCOTUS when it effectively ruled that Alexander Hamilton's interpretation of the Constitution (that Hamilton wrote) wasn't the interpretation of the court - specifically the court made a huge power grab and Hamilton was the lawyer arguing against that, and SCOTUS just told one of history's great orators, "Your words don't mean what you think they mean."
(Note that this power grab is widely regarded by history as a good thing.)

It's difficult to take a position on this either way. I'm lucky I live in a country where guns are, for the most part, not a problem in society. I say I'm lucky, I won't feel that way if society collapses, because then I'll be vulnerable, but in a civilised world, yes it's a plus. In USA, you kind of have to assume everyone is potentially armed. So anyone who is putting themself in a potentially violent situation as a mediator or figure of authority probably does need to be armed.

Negotiators in hostage situations are not armed - as it really sends the wrong message when the negotiator is trying to get a peaceful outcome.

When the police chief arrives on the scene of something, they're not necessarily armed. There are already a dozen or more armed police there by the time the head honcho shows up. The head honcho may or may not be armed, depending on their own personal style.

One day, one of these unarmed responders gets shot dead. And then we're back to square one.

This seems hyperbolic. You're serious, though, yeah?

It's certainly going to be the case that those people would get shot. The thing is that while they themselves are not armed, they have at least 2 combat trained officers backing them up. If your argument is that the threat of being shot back if a criminal shoots is what stops the criminal from shooting - I don't see how that changes just to have a different person shoot you than the one you shot.
Can you explain that to me?

Again, this is complicated a great deal when we have an armed population.

Keep in mind that the police themselves have been complaining for years that they are not trained to respond to mental health calls, and yet they are the ones sent to respond to mental health calls. They've repeatedly said they are not trained for these things, and expecting someone to be simultaneously trained in combat and in interpersonal relations and deescalation is a recipe for disaster. That's too big a switch to flip on and off in stressful situations.

I'm suggesting that unarmed police be the first on the scene with an armed entourage. I'm not suggesting that only unarmed cops should be sent anywhere.

So around 700 in a country of 350 million people, 200 million of whom are armed? I don't think that's all that alarming to be honest. In Brazil, their police killed a similar number of people in the first half of 2020 in Rio alone.

I have no idea what you're trying to say, here. I know nothing of the crime problems nor the corruption if any in Brazil or Rio.

Whether or not other people have it worse than I has no bearing on my desire to better myself.

This doesn't necessarily imply racist motives in the cops. It's an indication that black people suffer from poverty, on average, more than white people, and are therefore more likely to engage in crime. Maybe there's systematic racism at player here, coupled with cultural factors. But I'd be very surprised if the cops are more likely to shoot black people purely because of the racist feelings of the cop, excluding the occasional bad apple of course.

We totally agree, here. Except for "maybe there's systematic racism."
There's systematic racism.

I've tried to keep the links to a minimum and to find short and concise links to give you because I know your interest in the links is about 0. The video I linked above is a comedy group explaining just one way the systematic racism in community development has created black (and other minority) poverty. The policies literally created this poverty and then clamped it down. From federal policies that opened the doors to community developers taking that ball and running with it, to the banks just treating it like it's "normal" to deny loans to poor neighborhoods while knowing full well that those poor neighborhoods were predominantly non-white by design.

Seriously. Anyone who is denying that there is systemic racism in the US is simply not even looking to see whether or not the history bears that out. Might as well be a flat-Earther, IMO. There's infinite nuance in all of this. There's criticism and counter-criticism and counter-counter-criticism of just about every aspect in popular discourse. I'm trying to avoid those as much as possible and only cite things which are cut-and-dry.

This is fixable by legislation. They have body cams. Make it a legal requirement for them to be used. If they have a gun, they have their body cam on at all times.

I agree this would be a good step. Many police departments already have a policy at least like this in place and I do not know of any widespread pushback from the police themselves. By and large police like body cameras. They just don't necessarily like the public having access to them. Using them to get many more eyes on a crime scene has proven invaluable. Using them as diagnostic tools to find where there are gaps in training or recruitment is much appreciated.

They just don't like it when a "bad apple" gets their cam exposed and that's the imagery in the public eye of who police are and what they do.

(after 5 minutes of research, tops. grain of salt)

Certain groups of people? Yes, sure, like criminals. But anyone can do what this guy did, ie fall asleep drunk, get police attention, and get into a confrontation with them. We can all drink too much and act like a twat. Did this happen because the guy is black? I'm unaware of any evidence to assume this.

This is always the case. We can't know what the cop was thinking. Only what they did.

It's like radiation poisoning. After Chernobyl, let's say that 25% of all cancers to happen in the affected area are due to the radiation leak. Which 25% of all the cancers were the Chernobyl ones? We can't know. We only know that the statistics bear out this discrepancy.

I just want to restate that I have repeatedly said that fixing racist laws is the easiest way to address these issues. I'm not blaming cops for enforcing insidiously racist laws.
No one is enforcing openly racist laws. So the laws that are left are sneaky little fuckers. I'm sure some cops are whip smart, but as a group, they're not exactly known for their intellects. We shouldn't blame good people for being tricked into doing bad things by sneaky politicians.

"isolated" is a subjective terms and is probably best measured as a percentage rather than a clear figure. How many times when police draw their gun does someone get shot? If we're under 1% then I'd call it "isolated" when it does happen.

That's a dumb metric. The metric should be, "how many unarmed, nonviolent people have been shot by police?" When the statistics bear out this is non-0, that's a problem.

How much of a problem and what it will cost to affect change is a balance to be discussed. I am interested in the discussion at least for now.

Still a vastly different society.

Agreed. My point isn't to reminisce about the good old days. My point is to look at the actual facts that got us to where we are. This is important because the widely accepted assumptions about those facts are false.

I don't consider it to be an implicit assumption. It's an opinion I consider to be, on the balance of probabilities, correct. I would fear putting that opinion to the test.

A thought experiment is not dangerous.

The history that got us here is fraught with racism. The modern police forces in the US were literally groups of self-appointed slave chasers being racist assholes chasing runaway slaves with no legal authority to do so. When that fell out of popular favor, they rebranded themselves as police departments.

I want to be explicitly clear that I'm not drawing any direct parallels between the origin of US police (~150 years ago) and modern police officers. I do think it's illustrative to look at how appallingly corrupt the origins are and to examine how much of that heinous history is wiped out. Is it all gone? Or are there still long-dying repercussions that are also insidiously oppressing good people?

I guess we made the change because as populations increased, public safety became more of an issue.

Exactly the false assumptions that need to be explored for what they are.

Humans have lived in densely populated cities for thousands of years. Human morality hasn't changed in that time. The human genome has been relatively stable for tens of thousands of years - maybe hundreds of thousands. So the genetic propensity for crime and immoral behavior hasn't changed. The environmental pressures by-and-large haven't changed.

Public safety (as response to criminal and immoral behavior - not technology related safety) among human populations with numbers in the tens of thousands hasn't changed in at least tens of thousands of years. The vast majority of America (by area) is still populated by communities on those scales or smaller.

Equality in law is fundamental to a democratic society. It should be written into your constitution. I should be considered un-American to treat people differently in law.

Totally agreed.

So when we see the unequal treatment in law - when we hear the people who penned the laws admit that they designed the law to persecute Americans - that's a problem. A serious problem. A threat to democracy problem.

A problem well worth exploring with all our patience and open mindedness, IMO.

It wasn't the best analogy. My point was simply to remind you that it's not for individual police to decide what laws are and are not justified. They are contractually obliged, and probably by oath, to uphold the law.

Agreed. No reminder necessary.

It is fundamental to my point that I'm not blaming police for anything. I'm trying to understand how there are these vastly different world-views about what the police are and what we as a society get for having them. I'm trying to bridge the gaps in understanding why so many good people and fellow citizens feel like they're enemies.