In Their Own Words: Master and Commander edition
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 14 years ago, in 2010, on the World Wide Web.
The Los Angeles Police Protective League Board of Directors, on their understanding of Officer Safety
:
This time it was a Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel, essentially ruling that unless an officer is actually under physical attack, he/she cannot use a Taser to subdue a suspect. And, for good measure, these starry-eyed jurists, who probably have never been in a physical fight in their lives, opined that police officers should not fear irrational suspects defying officer commands as long as the suspect stays 15 feet from the officer.
As every street cop knows, any suspect within 15 feet who is actively resisting verbal commands is a threat to officer safety.
If a suspect complies with an officer's commands, the use of force or a weapon is unnecessary. When a suspect fails to comply with verbal commands, it means the situation is rapidly escalating and some form of force will be required to gain compliance.
(Via William N. Grigg.)
See also:
- GT 2010-01-11: Tiny weapons searches
- GT 2008-10-25: Translation from cop-speak to English
- GT 2009-10-12: The Police Beat: Officer Marc Rios, the Bronx, New York, New York
- GT 2008-06-30: Law and Orders #8: Memphis cop Bridges McRae
exceeds expectations
by punching Duanna Johnson repeatedly in the face with handcuffs over his knuckles for failing to stand up on command in the booking area at 201 Poplar - GT 2008-06-13: Law and Orders #7: Portland cops Erin Smith and Ron Hoesly find it
would be necessary
to pull Phil Sano down off his bike, beat him up, and taser him repeatedly, for biking without a headlight - GT 2008-02-01: Law and Orders #6: Pigs at the Trough
- GT 2007-12-23: Law and Orders #5: Daytona Beach cop takes control at Best Buy by shocking an unarmed,
retreating
woman - GT 2007-12-07: Law and Orders #4: Wichita cops take control by shocking a deaf man for not following orders he couldn't hear
- GT 2007-12-01: What a shock.
- GT 2007-11-27: Law and Orders #3: John Gardner of the Utah Highway Patrol tasers Jared Massey in front of his family for questioning why he was pulled over
- GT 2007-10-11: Law and Orders #2: Florida cop was
within bounds
when he punched and pepper-sprayed a 15-year-old girl for breaking curfew - GT 2006-11-16: Law and Orders: UCLA campus police
found it necessary
to repeatedly taser an Iranian student already lying helpless on the ground - GT 2009-07-29: Clown suits
- GT 2008-10-06: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter... (#7)
- GT 2008-05-11: Cops are here to protect you. (#4)
Follow
I read that before the 1850s most places did not have an organized police force as we would recognize them today. Kind of hard to imagine, really. Maybe population growth over the last 200 years had something to do with it?
Gabriel,
You’re right that modern professionalized police forces are a relatively new invention. (The Boston Police Department, usually cited as the oldest professional police force in the U.S.A., dates to 1854, although there was a small organized daytime patrol before that which was established in 1838.) Prior to that most law enforcement was carried out either by a few appointed officers (sheriffs and marshals, in the U.S.), by officially-organized posses, or by individual-level or mob informal enforcement. Larger cities did often hire on night watches to stand guard at checkpoints or make patrols around a relatively limited circuit.
Most cities developed a professionalized police force much later than that, even. I would argue that the fact that your average small town maintains a government police force these days is still largely a function of state and federal government subsidies aimed at putting
I’m sure that population growth had something to do with this; but I think that what had a lot more to do with it were (1) increasing demands on the government to act as an instrument of permanent social control (first by breaking Irish heads, later by attacking and people walking while black, then the War on Drug-users, etc.), where before it had acted mostly as an occasional agent of terror (so, not constant patrols and harassment, but rather the occasional massive reprisal); (2) political centralization and the spread of state and federal subsidies for their favored sort of local policies; and also (3) the emergence of professionalized, civil service models of government, with the consequent increases in government employment at all levels and the increasing insistence on professionalization, and on autonomous executive departments with independent hiring power and bureaucratic management.
I don’t understand what you mean by “increasing professionalization”? Haven’t governments always had civil functionaries like administrators and bureaucrats?
Do the reasons you give for the formation of police departments also apply to the increase in the prison population? What was imprisonment and punishment like before the 20th century?
Discussed at radgeek.com /#
Rad Geek People’s Daily 2010-01-23 – Siege mentality: