View Single Post
Old 02.01.2023, 01:54 AM   #644
The Soup Nazi
invito al cielo
 
The Soup Nazi's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Del Boca Vista
Posts: 17,994
The Soup Nazi kicks all y'all's assesThe Soup Nazi kicks all y'all's assesThe Soup Nazi kicks all y'all's assesThe Soup Nazi kicks all y'all's assesThe Soup Nazi kicks all y'all's assesThe Soup Nazi kicks all y'all's assesThe Soup Nazi kicks all y'all's assesThe Soup Nazi kicks all y'all's assesThe Soup Nazi kicks all y'all's assesThe Soup Nazi kicks all y'all's assesThe Soup Nazi kicks all y'all's asses
[cont'd]

The officers belonged to a unit of forty police called Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods, or SCORPION—an acronym that does little to invite community trust. Memphis created the unit in November, 2021, to address a spike in murders and gun violence during the pandemic. Since then, the mayor has touted the unit’s success by citing statistics about the sheer volume of its activity—the amount of money, guns, and cars seized, or the number of suspects arrested. By disregarding whether the arrests end in convictions—or even reduce crime—such metrics encourage aggression, Stoughton said. “You are incentivizing quantity over legality. Thirty years of research tells us that is a bad idea.”

Targeted police units like SCORPION, which concentrate on certain high-crime neighborhoods, have a checkered history. There were scandals at the Rampart unit, in Los Angeles, and the Gun Trace Task Force, in Baltimore, among others, and the Memphis Police Department said Saturday that it was disbanding the SCORPION unit. “What is supposed to be targeted enforcement becomes ‘We run the streets around here,’ ” Stoughton said.

A growing number of police chiefs and district attorneys, though, argue that there is a way to prevent at least some needless killings like Tyre Nichols’s, by focussing on why the police pulled him over. Along with the shibboleth that a failure to dominate encourages cop killing, the nineties study helped implant a second myth in police culture as well—that stopping cars is exceptionally dangerous to officers. That notion rests on the misuse of a statistic: a large percentage of police killed on the job die at roadside pullovers. In reality, such encounters are so numerous that the odds of death at any given stop are no higher than in other police work.

Yet units like SCORPION—created to go after gangs, guns, and drugs, not issue tickets for speeding and other traffic violations—often use such trivial infractions as a pretext to justify pulling over a car and looking inside it. Convinced that they risk their life each time they stop such a driver, many officers approach each encounter prepared for a life-or-death struggle. Few may be as hyperaggressive as the officers who killed Nichols, but their fear and belligerence can still evoke a reciprocal urge in a driver to talk back or flee, sparking a deadly cycle.

Stopping cars on little more than a hunch is also hopelessly inefficient. Five or more patrol cars and eight or more officers spent as much as an hour detaining Nichols on a night when they could have been targeting dangerous crime. Multiple studies have concluded that such a dragnet approach is ultimately an ineffective strategy for confiscating the guns, drugs, or other contraband that police seek in cars. Pretextual stops may even be counterproductive: they alienate law-abiding citizens in the high-crime neighborhoods where their coöperation is most essential. “We are talking about using a hammer on a problem that really requires a scalpel,” Stoughton said.

In the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, police and prosecutors in jurisdictions from Philadelphia to Los Angeles are attempting to end pretextual stops altogether. The city of Fayetteville, North Carolina, was one of the first to try the experiment, a decade ago. Civilian complaints about the Fayetteville police plunged, and so did traffic fatalities, with no notable increase in gun violence or drug crime. Eliminating pretextual stops, in other words, may reduce crime more effectively than units like SCORPION do. Tyre Nichols, of course, would still be alive if the police had never pulled him over. ♦
__________________

GADJI BERI BIMBA GLANDRIDI LAULI LONNI CADORI GADJAM A BIM BERI GLASSALA GLANDRIDI E GLASSALA TUFFM I ZIMBRA

 
The Soup Nazi is offline   |QUOTE AND REPLY|