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Terror attack in Wisconsin

I have heard several reports that the perpetrator was fleeing from a knife fight, or something like that. Does that make any sense at all? No, it doesn't. I don't believe the reports. Fake news.

Sure, it makes sense.

Not sure whether or not the reports are true, but there’s nothing nonsensical about it.
 
Huh. Well that's funny. The black guy has been... charged.

Not weeks later. Not after convening a grand jury. Not after national protests. Not after having to fire a DA who first wanted to bury it. He was just arrested. Just like that. No hand wringing, no drawing of lines, no arguing about definitions. As if charging people with crimes they commit is easy or something crazy like that.

Totally mind boggling to you, I suppose.
 
Darrell Brooks Jr. is the name of the suspect, it would appear.

ETA: I was confirming what Bogative said, in my head there was an emphasis on the "is", just fyi.
 
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Apparently Brooks was out on bond:

According to court records, Brooks was released from jail earlier this month on $1,000 bail after being charged with several counts including recklessly endangering safety and battery.

Wisconsin really needs to get its **** together. $1k for several counts? You can't even get out on bail for a DUI in NoDak (no matter what color) for $1,000 I don't think.

The link has some breakdowns of 2 previous arrests from July '20 and Nov '21.

If there's one thing that can be said, he's certainly violent.
 
In the George Zimmerman situation, the Derek Chauvin situation, the McMichaels, etc. - the authorities could tell right away that these people had done nothing wrong, but caved to pressure.

You're on pretty shaky ground with this claim. Derek Chauvin was convicted in a jury trial. The McMichaels most likely will be convicted.
 
Apparently Brooks was out on bond:



Wisconsin really needs to get its **** together. $1k for several counts? You can't even get out on bail for a DUI in NoDak (no matter what color) for $1,000 I don't think.

The link has some breakdowns of 2 previous arrests from July '20 and Nov '21.

If there's one thing that can be said, he's certainly violent.

On Nov 2 when he had contact with all the people he had court orders not to (as a condition of his 2020 bail), punched his ex in the face, then ran over her leg (with the same Ford Escape), then ignored police, locked himself in a house and resisted arrest, already had an open charge of 'bail jumping', and TWO open cases involving multiple felonies involving violence and guns....

They gave him bail of $1000?

The DA's office there now says this was an inappropriate setting of bail and they are doing an internal review.

(The ADA in these cases seems to be Michelle Grasso. No news items on her but it would seem she is already halfway under the bus with the DA's letter today)
 
On Nov 2 when he had contact with all the people he had court orders not to (as a condition of his 2020 bail), punched his ex in the face, then ran over her leg (with the same Ford Escape), then ignored police, locked himself in a house and resisted arrest, already had an open charge of 'bail jumping', and TWO open cases involving multiple felonies involving violence and guns....

They gave him bail of $1000?

The DA's office there now says this was an inappropriate setting of bail and they are doing an internal review.

(The ADA in these cases seems to be Michelle Grasso. No news items on her but it would seem she is already halfway under the bus with the DA's letter today)

There are a lot of people in the country now who flex about "bail reform" and think this makes them a good person.

I wouldn't be opposed to this Grasso person, if it was really her call / fault, being up on murder charges right along with Brooks.
 
They gave him bail of $1000?

The DA's office there now says this was an inappropriate setting of bail and they are doing an internal

Meh, cash bail shouldn't exist. You are either a flight risk/safety risk, or you are not. If you are, you should be remanded until you can resolve the safety/flight risk issue.

If you aren't, then no cash bail. You are free until your trial.

This guy should have been remanded.
 
On Nov 2 when he had contact with all the people he had court orders not to (as a condition of his 2020 bail), punched his ex in the face, then ran over her leg (with the same Ford Escape), then ignored police, locked himself in a house and resisted arrest, already had an open charge of 'bail jumping', and TWO open cases involving multiple felonies involving violence and guns....

They gave him bail of $1000?

The DA's office there now says this was an inappropriate setting of bail and they are doing an internal review.

(The ADA in these cases seems to be Michelle Grasso. No news items on her but it would seem she is already halfway under the bus with the DA's letter today)


I suppose it's worth bearing in mind that as horrible as those violations and alleged crimes are, they're depressingly commonplace in most urbanised areas of the US.

And as such, and since many/most of the violators and alleged perpetrators are poor, and since there's only so much non-prison incarceration space ever available, tough (and sub-optimal) decisions on bail often have to be reached. Those decisions are often (usually, even) made pretty hurriedly (otherwise they'd probably clog up the criminal justice system in and of themselves), and by people who often don't have access to the amount of information they'd perhaps wish they had.

When you graft onto that the capacity for individual/collective/systemic incompetence, I'd say it's grimly inevitable that every now and then an outrage such as this is going to occur. But is there a one-shot panacea? I really don't think there is.
 
I know a good way to avoid clogging up the prison system, etc.

How about if you are someone who commits violent offenses against other members of society, in the form of provable physical domestic abuse, unprovoked assaults on other people, rape, knife crime and gun crime of any kind - we just straight up execute you?

How about we do it fast? How about we do it after 3 strikes of these types of crime, or better yet 2 strikes (and depending on the severity / nature of the crime, 1 strike)?

EDIT: Obviously, the offense(s) would need to be well confirmed, but we benefit from being in an age now with a heck of a lot of forensic science and cameras everywhere, so a large number of these crimes could probably be proven quite conclusively and quickly.
 
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Meh, cash bail shouldn't exist. You are either a flight risk/safety risk, or you are not. If you are, you should be remanded until you can resolve the safety/flight risk issue.

If you aren't, then no cash bail. You are free until your trial.

This guy should have been remanded.


You can't see how the setting of cash bail - with its twin facets of a) the prospect of incurring a harmful financial penalty and/or b) the assistance offered by bail bond enforcers in assisting LE in tracking down bail-absconders - offers at least something in-between the all-or-nothing of remand or unconditional bail?

If the system were to be restricted in the way you suggest - in the US at least - then I'd suggest the system would very, very soon fall over. Because there would be barely any more capacity for remanding without bail in any event, plus there'd (almost by definition) be a heck of a lot more absconding by those granted unconditional bail instead of cash bail.

It's tempting to think there are near-bottomless resources (cash-wise, facility-wise and labour-wise) in something like the US criminal justice system, but unfortunately that's just not the case. Nowhere near, in fact.
 
EDIT: Obviously, the offense(s) would need to be well confirmed, but we benefit from being in an age now with a heck of a lot of forensic science and cameras everywhere, so a large number of these crimes could probably be proven quite conclusively and quickly.


Better still: I bet the CIA or NSA have by now developed a "Minority Event"-style technology for reading would-be criminals' minds and apprehending them in advance.

So hey - Gold Standard: the US could be getting rid of these people by rounding them up and executing them (probably humanely, I guess) before any crime was even committed!

:rolleyes:
 
Because at this point we don't know the driver or the motivation (ETA: Bogative supplied some information half an hour before I wrote this, but I had preloaded the window earlier and didn't see it) if this was a deliberate attack (as opposed to a very unfortunate and unusual mishap) I condemn it. I don't care if the driver:
  • is a hard right Trump-worshiping, Qanon believing whacko,
  • is a gun-toting, abortion banning climate-change denier,
  • is a soft conservative espousing smaller government and fiscal prudence,
  • is a soft liberal in favour of gun control, abortion rights who recycles aluminum,
  • is a "ban all guns and the government while we're at it" libertarian,
  • or is a far-left committed Marxist intent on bringing down the government through violence
To emphasize, if this is a deliberate attack, there is no excuse for it. I don't care if the person who did it shares all my beliefs (save for being willing to run a vehicle into a crowd of people) or is the polar opposite of me in every way. This sort of violence is reprehensible and has no place in a civilized society.

An atheist zealot telling the world what he thinks of Xmas.
 
Deliberately as in this was a planned attack? No.

IMO, there's 3 possible situations.

1. Planned attack. I'm not convinced of that yet, but it's possible.
2. Really drunk, unable to comprehend what was going on, and just drove into people when he couldn't avoid them anymore. Similar to a drunk person driving the wrong way on a highway.
3. Fleeing from something else, got stuck at the parade and took the risk of trying to drive through it and avoided people as best he could (or just didnt care) until he couldn't anymore.

Or somebody who really hated having his road blocked for a stupid parade. He went around the marchers, until he couldnt.
 
You can't see how the setting of cash bail - with its twin facets of a) the prospect of incurring a harmful financial penalty and/or b) the assistance offered by bail bond enforcers in assisting LE in tracking down bail-absconders - offers at least something in-between the all-or-nothing of remand or unconditional bail?

The obvious middle-ground is ankle-tracking (or getting the vaccine).
 
Better still: I bet the CIA or NSA have by now developed a "Minority Event"-style technology for reading would-be criminals' minds and apprehending them in advance.

So hey - Gold Standard: the US could be getting rid of these people by rounding them up and executing them (probably humanely, I guess) before any crime was even committed!

:rolleyes:

"Abstract: Through its monopoly on violence, the State tends to pacify social relations. Such pacification proceeded slowly in Western Europe between the 5th and 11th centuries, being hindered by the rudimentary nature of law enforcement, the belief in a man’s right to settle personal disputes as he saw fit, and the Church’s opposition to the death penalty. These hindrances began to dissolve in the 11th century with a consensus by Church and State that the wicked should be punished so that the good may live in peace. Courts imposed the death penalty more and more often and, by the late Middle Ages, were condemning to death between 0.5 and 1.0% of all men of each generation, with perhaps just as many offenders dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial. Meanwhile, the homicide rate plummeted from the 14th century to the 20th. The pool of violent men dried up until most murders occurred under conditions of jealousy, intoxication, or extreme stress. The decline in personal violence is usually attributed to harsher punishment and the longer-term effects of cultural conditioning. It may also be, however, that this new cultural environment selected against propensities for violence. "

Source


"Frost and Harpending, Evolutionary Psychology, 13 (2015), have argued that the increasing use of capital punishment across the Middle Ages in Europe altered the genotype, helping to create a less violent and generally more law-abiding population.

Source

The entire basis of us being a species that can even (kind of) do civilization is due to important evolutionary events throughout our species' history where certain types of individuals became more or less common.

If you want to continue to be a species that can "do civilization" it is necessary to prune undesirable genetic traits like propensity for violence, low impulse control, etc.

A huge culling of anyone with criminal / violent tendencies is exactly what must occur.

You can either hope that we somehow manage to pull this off with gene editing, or you can sign on to what I'm talking about. Spoiler alert: gene editing will come too slowly and face too much opposition.
 

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