Seattle Police, Protecting & Serving

I realize people like to take highly divergent positions in this type of thread. But I see it as inevitably complex. The first rule of a law enforcement officer cannot be "do not run a risk of being harmed" or the response every time would be for the officer to hide in a closet at headquarters instead of going on patrol. Or to shoot every citizen they see just in case one of them intends ill toward the officer.

The rule has to be: "do your job with the correct balance of risks to you and to the citizens that depend on you." This means that the officer has to be extra reasonable and go out of their way to diffuse the situation, and protect the innocent citizen, even if that requires the officer to incur a modest personal risk or to suppress an emotion that a regular citizen might be allowed to indulge (anger, revenge, etc). It is not easy, and I am not claiming that I, or another typical person, could do the job right. It requires great training and special personal traits. But so does commercial airline piloting, or even elevator repair.

Here we have examples of videos that appear to show that the individual officer was not an appropriate person for the job. The first suggests that the officer was a lier and possibly a racist. The second appears to show that the officer couldn't handle a situation without harming innocent citizens. Yes, there might be explanations for the police actions that justify what is on tape. But I can't imagine what they might be (the first shows the period leading up to the arrest, and whatever the provocation in the second, the response harmed uninvolved citizens). I would certainly want to hear any attempts at explanation, and I think that a detailed investigation would be important in each case. If events were as it appears, the officers were not appropriate to continue as police.
 
3point14 said:
I would disagree. I could understand an argument that said "These are the tests, if you can pass them you can apply" and let those that can pass, regardless of gender, go on and apply for police/fire etc. and there being no 'lesser' tests for ladies. I don't see how you could deny them access to those jobs based solely on gender (rather than ability) and not be considered deeply sexist.
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Well as it stands now the US has a draft for military service which only applies to men. Also with regard to certain types of military service, women have been barred traditionally. I know some of the following are changing or have changed in recent years, and I can't keep track of exactly what they've already overturned or are slowly overturning, but let me list off some I'm aware of circa a few years ago:

- No women in special forces
- No women on submarines
- No women in front-line combat duties
- No women allowed to pilot bombers and fighter jets

Most or all of those have been lifted or relaxed now, the pilot one was in 1993 (I checked) and the others have all only been starting to be relaxed or abandoned within the last few years.

Am I to believe that these policies were just pure sexism? That in 1992 or 2011 or 2013 America was supposedly just hating on women for no reason whatsoever when it came to letting them work in these sorts of jobs?

Or were these restrictions based on a society that hadn't yet flushed as much of its sanity down the toilet as we now have? A society that recognized that it is insane to send the sex that bears children, and has far less testosterone and consequently as a group can produce FAR fewer people who can physically do many of these tasks up to the standards that they've had?

Is it sexist to have such restrictions, or is it just a reflection of reality? Is it just an acknowledgement of the fact that men and women are different, and that while there are always deviations, the two sexes have averages which are calibrated wildly differently. One sex's averages are in a range which is suitable to these sorts of jobs, and the other's averages are simply not.

And again, as I said, the "these are the standards and we won't budge them even if only 1 woman in a million can pass" NEVER works. They always relax the standards because the camel's nose is under the tent and now it's legitimate to complain about unequal numbers.

A society that has gone mad enough to not acknowledge the differences between men and women by banning women from these jobs completely, is about one half step away from being mad enough to not acknowledge the fact that the averages will simply not produce more than a handful of women suited to those jobs. Far better to just not open the door in the first place.
 
madurobob said:
:) Worse than that, I am manager of same. Even more qualified to be a lifeguard!
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As a manager you have to look up above the cube walls from time to time, you may even know what the sun looks like. From a window, at least. Not really a fair comparison.

:D
 
Skeptic Tank said:
Is it sexist to have such restrictions
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Yes. It is.

Who are you to decide what any individual women can or cannot do? I accept that, on average, women are less likely to be able to perform certain tasks than men, however there are women who can perform these tasks at least to standard and sometimes much better. Who are you to decide that they are only to be baby making machines in case the men of the tribe are wiped out in some unwise war?


Skeptic Tank said:
And again, as I said, the "these are the standards and we won't budge them even if only 1 woman in a million can pass" NEVER works. They always relax the standards because the camel's nose is under the tent and now it's legitimate to complain about unequal numbers.
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This is a strawman and not relevant to the discussion.
 
3point14 said:
Yes. It is.

Who are you to decide what any individual women can or cannot do? I accept that, on average, women are less likely to be able to perform certain tasks than men, however there are women who can perform these tasks at least to standard and sometimes much better. Who are you to decide that they are only to be baby making machines in case the men of the tribe are wiped out in some unwise war?




This is a strawman and not relevant to the discussion.
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Who are you to decide that any individual 15 year old cannot be a airline pilot? Most of them aren't up to it, but a few are.

There are reasons we have firm cut offs on things like age you can vote, drink, smoke, do certain jobs, become president, consent to sex, etc.

We know there are exceptions, but we have to have rules which ignore exceptions and look at the vast bulk of group averages and go from there.

How is not being able to be a front-line soldier, a cop having direct interactions with criminals and executing arrests, a submariner, a Navy seal, a firefighter hauling people out of burning buildings, etc. equivalent to being only a "baby making machine" ???

The vast majority of men will never do any of these jobs. Are they mere baby-making machines (their participation is also required to make a baby after all) because they didn't do this very narrow set of possible vocations?

Nobody who can still be a lawyer, a journalist, a CEO, etc. could be described as having been relegated to being nothing but a "baby making machine" that's silliness.

Biology is cruel and it sets limits. I will never be able to be a surrogate mother or a wet nurse or a Victoria's Secret model no matter how much I may want to (I don't want to, but for the sake of argument)

Tough luck for me. We're not all equal and we're not all suited to every task.
 
Toontown said:
Another bad cop thread? Seriously? And this is all you could come up with?

Bad cop pickings must be a mite slim at the moment. Perhaps if you waited a few days...who knows. Some cop somewhere might do something really bad. I mean, it's bound to happen sooner or later. Have some patience.

BTW, aren't there any bad European cops? I want to read about some bad European cops. But not Russians. It's a given that they're all bad.
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There are examples in the UK

This current one for example.


http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/26/julian-cole-ipcc-police-brutality-allegations

The family claim police initially tried to mislead them in the immediate aftermath. They say one officer told them Cole was talking after his arrest, but that this would be impossible with a severed spinal cord. Another allegedly said Cole was drunk. He had consumed alcohol but tests show he was not drunk and was under the drink-drive limit.

“Bedfordshire police tried to cover up what their officers did to Julian by alleging that Julian was conscious and ‘chatty’ in the back of the police van,” Claudius Cole added.
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By this time his neck had been broken, so he was incapable of being "chatty".
 
Last night one of her ex-girlfriends went to the press with sordid tales of racism & theft of impounded drugs. I'm not sure where I stand on this one, as the ex-girlfriend has a pretty troubling past herself.

Today a Metro bus driver came forward to add to the story, complete with evidence that she filed a report then and it was ignored.

Keep in mind this is a city where the cop that shot a First Nations carver on the street was allowed to resign instead of being fired, and the cop who stomped a "suspect" (stopped only because he had the same skin color) and told him he'd "beat the Mexican **** out of him" got a mild demotion.

This is why the Department of Justice came to visit, and found a pattern of use of force well above & beyond what was required. We've been through several (mostly "acting") chiefs of police since then trying to get some control of the department. Nothing really seems to change, though, and a number of cops have reacted by refusing to take action whenever they can get away with it (de-policing). All this while the city grows insanely fast.
 
Seattle seems to have had a lot of problems with its police department.

And the disciplinary sanctions on officers seem rather lame.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Police_Department#Misconduct

I liked this one:

In January 2014, Detective David Blackmer plead guilty to stalking his mistress after she threatened to reveal their relationship to his wife. He was sentenced to 90 days in jail. An internal police investigation was then launched to determine whether he should be fired
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:eek:
 
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