Month: June 2020

Well what a surprise. The Lousiville officers who broke down the door to Briana Taylor’s apartment and killed her while shooting at someone else did not have body cams.

Other Lousiville officers who killed a restaurant owner David McAtee for the crime of serving barbeque did not have their cameras turned on.

I think it is time we started treating police like airline pilots. The cockpit voice recorder and the digital flight data recorder are required pieces of equipment. The body cam should also be required equipment.

• You cannot start a shift without one, in working order.

• It stays on all the time.

• If it stops working, you go back to the station.

Police argue that they can’t leave the cameras on because otherwise people won’t talk to them. You know what? Killing unarmed civilians also makes them reluctant to talk to you.

I think it is now time to shut down the Republican Party. I am sorry to say that everyone who is a member of the Republican Party must be held responsible for the abomination that is Donald Trump.

If there are any members of the party who are actually conservatives and who loath what Trump is doing to the country, it is their duty to turn in their cards and hopefully start a new party which will hold to actual conservative principles. We need such a group, but the current bunch are just grifters

I will not vote for a Republican ever again. I kind of like my governor Charlie Baker, but so far he hasn’t quit the party and therefore I will hold him personally responsible for the actions and failures to act of the national party.

I call on all citizens to vote in November to remove every Republican from every office nationwide. They have lead the nation to ruin and are responsible for what has happened. They failed to hold their man to account at any point and now it is simply too late. Over 100,000 americans are dead from Covid-19 and it happened on their watch.

It’s like Harry Truman said, the buck stops here.

George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was killed by police in Minneapolis last week.

The officer who killed him, and the three others who stood by and let it happen, were summarily fired, but in spite of video, none were arrested or charged until protests turned to riot.

The killer, officer Derik Chauvin had at least 17 misconduct complaints, mostly for excessive force, yet nothing was done.

The government, which records much data, somehow fails to record how many civilians are killed by police each year, but independent groups do keep track and the number is typically over 1000. The police kill black people at a rate almost three times the rate at which they kill white people. See for example https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/

I have some modest suggestions.

• Cancel and renegotiate all police union contracts so that bad officers can be successfully removed from the force.
• Write legislation to fix 42 USC section 1983, which permits people to sue the government for civil rights violations. The courts have pretty well eviscerated this law, so that it is nearly impossible to successfully sue in spite of the most egregious violations. Search for “qualified immunity”.
• Require that all police killings be investigated and if appropriate, prosecuted by arms length teams who have no relationships with the local force. It is clearly obvious that local prosecutors will not do their jobs. All investigations must be made public. It is too important for anyone to hide behind privacy.
• Any officer who kills a civilian should be placed in a desk job for at least a year. Every police killing <must> be tried by a jury of the public. Maybe it was justified, maybe not, but you don’t get a second chance to kill the people you are supposed to protect. All proceding must be made public.
• All police discipline records must be public. Doctors have this, are they killing unarmed black men?
• Terminated officers must not be rehired by any other police force.

I really don’t condone rioting, looting, or burning down cities as forms of protest, but since nothing less seems to work, I do understand the impulse.