<p>What also disturbs me about Lynch’s rhetoric and the unprofessional actions of some police officers which even current Police Chief Bratton doesn’t support is not only their failure to understand the good reasons why they are and should welcome being held to a higher standard* than civilians, but also how their actions would not be allowed to pass blithely if it happened in the military.</p>
<p>While one cousin who was a Naval aviator during Bill Clinton’s presidency had many serious issues with him being commander in chief, if he or any military personnel turned their backs on Clinton during his presidency in uniform or even attended any political protest during their off-time while wearing their uniform, they’d face serious disciplinary sanctions up to and including dismissal under conditions lower than Honorable discharge for violating regulations against insubordination and/or the unauthorized wearing of uniforms while engaged in political activities as wearing the uniform implies the military’s support of their political agendas respectively. </p>
<ul>
<li>Police officers are professionally trained, armed and authorized by the state to enforce the law and to use deadly force as a last resort if public safety or their own lives are at imminent risk. It’s also ironic considering many police officers do regard themselves akin to the military by referring to the rest of the public as “civilians”.<br></li>
</ul>
<p>There are some serious difference between law enforcement officers and military personnel.</p>
<p>People in the military are expected to be willing to give their lives for their country. Sometimes police officers die in the line of duty, but they are not expected to. Law enforcement officials can quit. They can be fired. Military personnel can go to prison for things that many civilians would consider trivial.</p>
<p>Military personnel must follow lawful orders, must show respect, and sometimes must die to protect their country. Though there are similarities, being in the military is an entirely different level of what is required in personal conduct. I’m sure our government officials would just love it if a police officer had to salute him or her, treat them with respect no matter what idiotic thing they did or said, and go to jail for any possible infraction. They would be in power hungry heaven.</p>
<p>“Amen. Despite what you on the right want to believe, I don’t know a SINGLE liberal who thinks of Al Sharpton as anything other than an annoying fly on the wall. No one takes him seriously. No one thinks he is the Second Coming or “the” voice for liberals or blacks. We are bemused how important you all think he is, when we think he’s unimportant and a distraction from real issues.”</p>
<p>I guess you haven’t read all the posts on this thread. It’s good that you think he’s a joke, but unfortunately for many, he is one of the spokesmen for the latest topic of the day. Turn on your tv, he’s on every major news channel, and at every major protest. For this topic, he IS the voice. Unfortunately, you are a party of one, and cannot speak for all liberals or blacks, though I’m glad you have the common sense to think he is unimportant.</p>
<p>I’m with Cobrat; we can’t have police showing public disgust for civilian authority. That’s what used to regularly happen in Banana Republics. Do we want Police who flout civil conventions, like in Mexico and Brazil? We can’t have that in the United States of America.</p>
<p>It goes both ways. Is it just fine to have civilian leaders show public disgust for the police? Some of our government officials are the most loathsome individuals ever. However are you going to force police officers to show respect to some of these scumbags? And should we? Good luck trying to force particular behaviors through a strong union, and good luck with the legality of trying to do so.</p>
<p>The reality is, it’s easy if the civilian authority figure is a good leader. There are few issues if the leader shows respect and support for his or her troops, while not allowing illegal activity. Many government officials are capable of doing this well. But some are only capable of saying what they think they need to in order to get into, and stay in office.</p>
<p>This very unprofessional attitude among police and military was one factor in the rise of fascist regimes in the 1930’s. </p>
<p>In fact, the fall of the last Japanese civilian dominated government was preceded by widespread contempt among police and military officer corps for civilian politicians to the point of blatantly ignoring orders(i.e. Invasion of Manchuria in 1931 was done on the initiative of the IJA Kwantung army commanders without prior authorization from the civilian government) which later escalated into widespread assassinations against civilian politicians and military commanders they felt were not militaristic enough. </p>
<p>Uh…I don’t think turning your back on a civilian official you feel has not supported you, in matter of life or death situations, has any similarity with assassinating civilian politicians and military commanders.</p>
<p>In fact, a much more serious problem is with those policing who obey their government leaders to the point of arresting, torturing and executing those who speak out against the government in some way. See multiple examples of any communist country, and how about those 43 students at the Iguala protests…showed up to protest the government, arrested at direction of the mayor, and turned over to the drug lords to be executed, with their body parts to be gathered in bags, what they can find of them. Horrific.</p>
<p>Guess they should have shown those civilian officials a little more respect, ay?</p>
<p>In both of those societies, widespread contempt and public expressed attitudes of such expressed by police and military officers was a critical factor which led to the rise of fascist regimes. One dominated by a right-wing militaristic clique and another by a right-wing party aided and abetted by a deeply conservative right-wing militaristic officer corps in control of a military which became a “state within a state”. </p>
<p>If you looked more closely into those two societies which became fascist, you’d realize there’s some parallels to what you’ve pointed out about communist regimes. </p>
<p>Only difference was the police/military forces favored right-wing political activists whether it’s civilian participants with Japanese militarists or right-wing political parties in terms of arrests, kid-glove treatment in prisons, and sentences whereas those of other political persuasions were violently beaten, sentenced to long prison terms, subjected to atrocities, and/or executed. </p>
<p>Case in point, the German police’s sympathetic and lenient treatment of a certain right-wing activist after he attempted a coup in 1923…</p>
<p>I saw an interesting comparison between the murder of these 2 NYPD officers and 2 Las Vegas officers murdered in June of this same year:</p>
<p>“When Jerad and Amanda Miller shot Las Vegas police officers Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo execution style as the two men ate pizza, the Millers said the killing was the start of the revolution and they wrapped the bodies of their victims in the “Don’t tread on me,” flag that has come to symbolize the Tea Party Movement. The couple also Facebook-liked Operation American Spring, Alliance Defending Freedom, the National Rifle Association, The Heritage Foundation, Rand Paul 2016, Three Percenter Nation, Ron Paul, and Drudge Report. In the case of last week’s horrendous NYC police killings (1) the killer wasn’t from New York or part of the BLM movement, (2) the killer also attempted to kill his girlfriend, who was not a police officer, (3) Barack Obama, Bill de Blasio, the family of Michael Brown and the family of Eric Garner condemned the murders of NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.” From Raw Story. </p>
<p>In other words, if you or someone condemns Al Sharpton or Obama or de Blasio, then the Tea Party and FoxNews and all these other people are just as guilty … even more so because the NYC killer was a violent nutcase with a long history of arrests while the killers in Las Vegas were actual political activists linked to actual political activity. </p>
<p>So my take is: there will always be evil nutcases and if you blame others for their nutcases, then you must also blame yourself for your nutcases. You can’t pick and choose.</p>
<p>Somewhere out there, somebody’s burning out a liquor store while mass demonstrations against the civil structure are going on, with the approval of:
the Heritage Foundation
the NRA
Ron Paul
Matt Drudge
add whomever you want</p>
<p>For equivalency, there pretty much has to be.</p>
<p>How about the armed standoff between Clive Bundy & family and the authorities…including pointing firearms at LEOs because he and his family felt the Federal government shouldn’t enforce its rights to collect 2 decades worth of back rent on Federally owned land he used as forage for his cattle and thus…acting remarkably like the popular right-wing stereotype of a “welfare queen”. </p>
<p>Especially considering he’s lost every suit claiming he doesn’t owe all that rent thus far…</p>
<p>Not to mention his armed group has held up and intimidated residents with armed roadblocks. </p>
<p>Here’s something that sickened me: an actual news station, an actual network affiliate in an actual major market edited c-span footage to change a chant at a protest from “We can’t stop. We can’t stop. Till killer cops are in cell blocks” to “We can’t stop. We can’t stop. So kill a cop.” This was - need I say? - a Fox affiliate, Fox45 in Baltimore. The “news” anchor says these words and then they play a clip - a screen capture of a youtube video - which is edited to so it sounds like those words by cutting off the rest. They were caught by Gawker and then by Talking Points Memo. [url=<a href=“http://gawker.com/slimy-baltimore-fox-affiliate-caught-faking-kill-a-cop-1674040381]Here[/url”>Slimy Baltimore FOX Affiliate Caught Faking "Kill a Cop" Protest Chant]Here[/url</a>] is a link to Gawker.</p>
<p>So if some guy kills a protestor or the like, then are these deceitful idiots the cause? These guys make Ron Burgundy look like Stephen Hawking.</p>
<p>If I lived in Baltimore, I would file an FCC complaint against the station because this kind of reporting should be and I hope is a violation of licensing laws.</p>
<p>It seems creepy to me to try to rationalize one individual’s behavior by comparing it to behavior from another individual or perception of another group. It seems like trying to justify that person’s murderous behavior as not so bad, because look at what A, B, and C did. So what? I look at what each individual does, and I don’t randomly blame a particular group because of what one person does, or because of what one group did, decades or hundreds of years ago. Or what I think some person in a group of hundreds of thousands might have said, that therefore it represents the entire group.</p>
<p>Next, we’ll have people blaming the Crusades.</p>
<p>Here we have Godwin’s Law invoked already:
"Godwin’s law (or Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies) is an Internet adage asserting that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches— that is, if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler or Nazism.”</p>
<p>The Baltimore TV station had the chanter on the air live to correct the story and the tape was not falsely edited, it was cut off which is not the same thing. However, there are plenty of real cop killer chants going all the way back to Ferguson and I’m sure we’ve all seen some of them in addition to the lovely clip of Michael Brown’s convict stepdad encouraging the crowd to burn down the block which did happen although I’m sure he had nothing to do with it.</p>
<p>Incidentally, the last important edited tape scandal was when NBC really did edit a 911 call from George Zimmerman to make it appear as though his problem was all about race when in fact that was an answer to the standard dispatcher description question. And no it’s not against any laws to clip a tape and even NBC was cleared so there you go.</p>
<p>marie, you are wrong. The Fox affiliate in Baltimore edited the chant AND ALSO had a Fox speaker saying “We won’t stop, we can’t stop, so kill a cop”. As if she were stating correctly what the protesters were saying. </p>
<p>Two other things - the main “chanter” is a woman whose brother was killed while in police custody in Baltimore over a year ago and they still haven’t provided an autopsy report to the family.</p>
<p>The Fox reporter has altered the truth before - while reporting on an alleged rape during the Occupy movement. </p>
<p>One more thing - the station offered a non-apology apology, never mentioning that they had deliberately falsified the events they were depicting. For that falsification, they should lose their FCC license. </p>
<p>What was I wrong about exactly. I get that they messed up the chanters words and invited her on to correct it. I don’t know anything about the occupy rape, but I do know that there FCC license will be just fine. </p>
<p>The groups protesting are not all coming from the same place with their dislike of the police department. There are groups within groups, and some are using this stage for different reasons. </p>
<p>While most, if not all would agree, especially if one has been the victim of brutish police behavior, there are rogue cops, who do think they are above reproach. My own son and his friends have been harassed by police on different occasions, they are white boys 15 -16 years old. They are followed regularly by police, chased from playing ball at the local parks, one boys wallet fell to the ground and the cop threatened to shoot him when he went to pick it up kid was 15 years old. My own village police harass young people on a regular basis, in a village of 10,000 people where the worst infraction maybe a broken window. Needless to say the young men white or black have a dislike for the police.</p>
<p>My memory of NYC and the NYPD in the 70’s and 80’s is of what my parents told me about, and I fear we are returning to those days. Going forward, I won’t allow my kids to go into NYC, too volatile. Not unlike the 70’s80’s environment the relationship with the Mayor and NYPD is fractured.</p>
<p>My uncle was stabbed as a NYC cop on the subway in the 70’s just because he was a cop.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the invocation of Godwin’s law has also been uncritically used by conservative-leaning posters as an anti-intellectual means to silence those who are making salient points on the topic of discussion.</p>
<p>Such as allowing military or police personnel IN UNIFORM to show rank disrespect for civilian officials has had past historical precedent…and tends not to end well for such societies until such military/police institutions are reformed or completely dismantled. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Considering how the FCC’s powers has been gutted by the elimination of the fairness doctrine in the late '80s and the fact media conglomerates like Fox have many high powered lawyers on their payroll, I’m not sure how effective the FCC will be in this regard.</p>
<p>“Unfortunately, the invocation of Godwin’s law has also been uncritically used by conservative-leaning posters as an anti-intellectual means to silence those who are making salient points on the topic of discussion.”</p>
<p>Really weak, cobrat.</p>
<p>I think you (and some others) are trying awfully hard to make something political out of what is not political at all.
If you can take political bias out of your thought process, it is amazing how much clearer and rational you can be.
But for some, it is virtually impossible.</p>