From each according to his ability, to each according to his need....

[Despanan]

Dehumanizing? Certainly, though not nearly as much as some other words that are available.

So what's your issue here Versus? Care to stop being passive aggressive and just lay your cards on the table?

[Versus]

I'm not being passive aggressive, I just don't think it takes a wall of text to express that it's unfair to them. Especially because I think you understand where I'm coming from.

[Despanan]

Originally Posted by Versus

I'm not being passive aggressive, I just don't think it takes a wall of text to express that it's unfair to them. Especially because I think you understand where I'm coming from.

My mistake. What you'd typed had come across that way to me, as we're just a few lines of text in a forum and I don't like to have to guess at what someone's specific issue is.

Also, sorry for the late response. Been Uber busy.

As for the label "stormtroopers" being unfair/dehumanizing...I will concede that it is.

However, considering the actions of the NYPD, I cannot bring myself to refer to them as "cops" or "police officers" in certain contexts. That title automatically confers a great deal of respect and authority. It leads us as a society to subconsciously ascribe positive traits to their actions.

When you have a police force as thoroughly corrupt as the NYPD. When you have cops in uniform essentially acting as mercenaries for private companies, and make no mistake that's exactly what they were on October 17th, when after recieving a 4.6 million dollar bribe from Chase Bank, they lead 700 people including my friends onto the Brooklyn Bridge and arrested them, hoping that the traffic jam would turn the city against Occupy.

That's exactly how they were behaving when they directed drunks and drug-addicts to zuccotti, that is exactly what they are doing when they arrested folks, seemingly at random, and with no intent to actually prosecute, that is exactly how they are behaving when their union attempted to illegally take away Captain Ray Lewis's pension, that is exactly how they behave when they grope and sexually assault female protesters with the intent of scaring them away and arresting the men who try to intervene on the charge of assaulting a police officer. That is how they behave when they take a medic's head and use it to shatter a plate glass window. That is how they behave when they use a three-year old open container violation as an excuse to kick in the door of mayday organizers and search their homes.

Now I've met some good cops, I've even met good cops while protesting. I understand the situation they're in and I sympathize: However the uniform does not relieve them of responsibility for their actions or the actions of their fellows. When they take part in these illegal, corrupt, and nasty activities, when they use that badge and that responsibility as an excuse to squash dissent in an illegal and unethical manner, they deserve at least a little dehumanizing speech. They deserve to feel ashamed to put on that uniform, because they aren't fulfilling the role of a police officer. They are not protecting and serving the people, they are behaving as bullies vandals and mercenaries.

Like Sargent Shamar Thomas says: There is no honor in this.

The fact that their Captains and Commissioners ordered them to do it is problematic. The fact that their union will not back them up of course causes problems for the good, honorable officers who donned that uniform for the right reasons, but at the end of the day they need to be putting pressure on their union and their leadership to change things, because if they don't they're complicit in the actions of their department.

And that is just unacceptable. So I'll have to ask your pardon for comparing them to clones of Jango Fett from time to time.

[Saya]

I think part of why Versus protests the usage is that you wouldn't say that about American soldiers even if worse things have been done in other countries, and like soldiers its not like every single one is corrupt and okay with what is happening.

[Despanan]

Originally Posted by Saya

I think part of why Versus protests the usage is that you wouldn't say that about American soldiers even if worse things have been done in other countries, and like soldiers its not like every single one is corrupt and okay with what is happening.

I understand and as I said, I'm taking into account that not everyone of them, or even the majority are corrupt, but even the good one's still take part in corrupt actions.

Also, police are not military, and it's the militarization of police, in both attitude and weaponry that is largely to blame for alot of the stuff I'm seeing.

I would be hesitant to lay these charges against our troops because I have no direct knowledge as to what goes on overseas. Thus it would be inappropriate to speak so judgmentally of the actions of US service members.

However I do have direct knowledge as to what goes on with the NYPD as I'm on the ground in NYC. I've seen alot of this stuff first hand. As such, I'm confident that my mild critique is both deserved and accurate.

[AshleyO]

I am very curious about something. When did standard riot-geared police become militarization?

[Saya]

And when did "I'm ignorant about our war crimes overseas" become an excuse for war crimes?

Surely you know of the ones that got a lot of media attention like Abu Gharib or the recent massacre in Afghanistan, or even Gitmo.

[AshleyO]

So looking at the pictures, I've concluded that if Versus was to fight in our wars wearing what these police are wearing, he'd probably be very easy to rub out.

Just sayin'...

I mean, you MIGHT be able to compare these cops to Master-At-Arms on a Navy base, but even the MAs were wearing bullet vests and some were on duty with m-16s.

[Despanan]

Originally Posted by AshleyO

I am very curious about something. When did standard riot-geared police become militarization?

Probably when they armed them with M-16's, Military-Issue Sound-Cannons, Tanks, and limited anti-aircraft capabilities post 9-11.

Here's an article about it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/su...pagewanted=all

Originally Posted by Al Baker of the NYTimes

Op-Art: Riot Gear’s Evolution (December 4, 2011)
Is this the militarization of the American police?


RIOT police officers tear-gassing protesters at the Occupy movement in Oakland, Calif. The surprising nighttime invasion of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, carried out with D-Day-like secrecy by officers deploying klieg lights and a military-style sound machine. And campus police officers in helmets and face shields dousing demonstrators at the University of California, Davis with pepper spray.

Police forces undeniably share a soldier’s ethos, no matter the size of the city, town or jurisdiction: officers carry deadly weapons and wear uniforms with patches denoting rank. They salute one another and pay homage to a “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” hierarchical culture.

But beyond such symbolic and formal similarities, American law and tradition have tried to draw a clear line between police and military forces. To cast the roles of the two too closely, those in and out of law enforcement say, is to mistake the mission of each. Soldiers, after all, go to war to destroy, and kill the enemy. The police, who are supposed to maintain the peace, “are the citizens, and the citizens are the police,” according to Chief Walter A. McNeil of Quincy, Fla., the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, citing the words of Sir Robert Peel, the father of modern-day policing.

Yet lately images from Occupy protests streamed on the Internet — often in real time — show just how readily police officers can adopt military-style tactics and equipment, and come off more like soldiers as they face down citizens. Some say this adds up to the emergence of a new, more militaristic breed of civilian police officer. Others disagree.

What seems clear is that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, and the federal Homeland Security dollars that flowed to police forces in response to them, have further encouraged police forces to embrace paramilitary tactics like those that first emerged in the decades-long “war on drugs.”

Both wars — first on drugs, then terror — have lent police forces across the country justification to acquire the latest technology, equipment and tactical training for newly created specialized units.

“There is behind this, also, I think, a kind of status competition or imitation, that there is positive status in having a sort of ‘big department muscle,’ in smaller departments,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. “And then the problem is, if you have those kinds of specialized units, that you hunt for appropriate settings to use them and, in some of the smaller police departments, notions of the appropriate settings to use them are questionable.”

Radley Balko, a journalist who has studied the issue, told a House subcommittee on crime in 2007 that one criminologist found a 1,500 percent increase in the use of SWAT (special weapons and tactics) teams in the United States in roughly the last two decades.

The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally bars the military from law enforcement activities within the United States. But today, some local and city police forces have rendered the law rather moot. They have tanks — yes, tanks, often from military surplus, for use in hostage situations or drug raids — not to mention the sort of equipment and training one would need to deter a Mumbai-style guerrilla assault.

Such tactics are used in New York City, where Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly (whose department has had armored vehicles for decades) has invoked both the 19th-century military strategist Carl von Clausewitz and the television series “24” in talking about the myriad threats his city faces — both conventional and terrorist. After the would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad was arrested aboard a plane at Kennedy Airport in 2010, Mr. Kelly calculated the plot-to-capture time: slightly more than 53 hours.

“Jack Bauer may have caught him in 24,” said Mr. Kelly, who served as a Marine commander in Vietnam. “But in the real world, 53’s not bad.”

IN truth, a vast majority of Mr. Kelly’s 35,000-member force are not specialized troops, but rank-and-file beat cops. But that did not stop Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg from sounding like Patton at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last week, when he boasted, “I have my own army in the N.Y.P.D.,” suggesting his reasons for preferring City Hall to the White House. More disturbing than riot gear or heavy-duty weapons slung across the backs of American police officers is a “militaristic mind-set” creeping into officers’ approach to their jobs, said Timothy Lynch, director of the criminal justice project at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “It is in the way they search and raid homes and the way they deal with the public,” he said.

The more the police fail to defuse confrontations but instead help create them — be it with their equipment, tactics or demeanor — the more ties with community members are burned, he said. The effect is a loss of civility, and an erosion of constitutional rights, rather than a building of good will.

“What is most worrisome to us is that the line that has traditionally separated the military from civilian policing is fading away,” Mr. Lynch said. “We see it as one of the most disturbing trends in the criminal justice area — the militarization of police tactics.”

Police officials insist they are not becoming more militarized — in their thinking or actions — but merely improving themselves professionally against evolving threats. This is the way to protect citizens and send officers home alive at the end of shifts in an increasingly dangerous world, they say. Of course, in the event of a terrorist attack, they have to fill the breach until federal or National Guard troops can rush in.

“If we had to take on a terrorist group, we could do that,” said William Lansdowne, the police chief in San Diego and a member of the board of the Major Cities Chiefs Association. Though his force used federal grants to buy one of those fancy armored vehicles — complete with automatic-gun portals — he said the apparatus was more useful for traditional crime-busting than counter-terrorism.

“We are seeing suspects better armed than ever before,” Chief Lansdowne said.

Now the Occupy movement and highly publicized official responses to it are forcing the public to confront what its police forces have become. But analysts say that even here the picture of policing is mixed. While scenes from Oakland were ugly, the police in Los Angeles and Philadelphia last week evacuated Occupy encampments relatively peacefully; Los Angeles officers used a cherry picker to pluck protesters from trees.

Police officers are not at war, said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, and cannot imagine themselves as occupying armies. Rather, they must approach any continuing Occupy protests, now or in the spring, with a respect for the First Amendment and a realization that protesters are not enemies but people the police need to engage with up the road.

“You can have all the sophisticated equipment in the world, but it does not replace common sense and discretion and finding ways to defuse situations,” Mr. Wexler said. “You can’t be talking about community policing one day and the next day have an action that is so uncharacteristic to the values of your department.”

Originally Posted by Saya

And when did "I'm ignorant about our war crimes overseas" become an excuse for war crimes?

Surely you know of the ones that got a lot of media attention like Abu Gharib or the recent massacre in Afghanistan, or even Gitmo.

I never said it's an excuse, I said that I, Despanan, would be uncomfortable using the same language to refer to troops overseas since I hadn't seen that stuff with my own eyes.

Besides, if you feel this way Saya, shouldn't you be calling US soldiers Stormtroopers, or worse?

[Despanan]

[Despanan]

In case You can't see the first pic I linked:

http://www.cloutonline.com/wp-conten...3-500x3801.jpg

Here's another:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_tEzvr3oVq_.../s400/ESU3.jpg

[Saya]

Originally Posted by Despanan

I never said it's an excuse, I said that I, Despanan, would be uncomfortable using the same language to refer to troops overseas since I hadn't seen that stuff with my own eyes.

Besides, if you feel this way Saya, shouldn't you be calling US soldiers Stormtroopers, or worse?

Soooo the only oppressions that matter are the ones that you suffer/witness?

And no, I wouldn't call them that. When you send people to war, its ultimately going to happen and we shouldn't be surprised. Police are different, but the same logic applies, when power over others is given it will more often than not be abused. I have cops in the family and volunteer with a few though and I know better than to think they're mindless clone armies.

[Versus]

It's pretty exclusive to say that somebody should give up their career for speaking out to their chain of command. You wouldn't ask immigrants to risk deportation for being arrested, would you?

[Versus]

Also, /nitpick

The equipment that those marines are wearing is very different from what those police officers are wearing.

[Despanan]

Originally Posted by Saya

Soooo the only oppressions that matter are the ones that you suffer/witness?

No, I just make it a policy to try not to talk about things I have limited knowledge of.

And no, I wouldn't call them that. When you send people to war, its ultimately going to happen and we shouldn't be surprised. Police are different, but the same logic applies, when power over others is given it will more often than not be abused. I have cops in the family and volunteer with a few though and I know better than to think they're mindless clone armies.

So why do you assume I think that? For that matter, what SHOULD I call them, as "police officer" is inappropriate.

[Saya]

Man, even Cop Killer just called them cops, sometimes pigs but mostly cops.

[Despanan]

Originally Posted by Versus

It's pretty exclusive to say that somebody should give up their career for speaking out to their chain of command. You wouldn't ask immigrants to risk deportation for being arrested, would you?

When did I say they should give up their careers?

Also: I never said the equipment was the same (You'll recall that I said police are not military) nor does it need to be for my point to be valid.

[Despanan]

Originally Posted by Saya

Man, even Cop Killer just called them cops, sometimes pigs but mostly cops.

And I call them cops. Occasionally Stormtroopers but mostly cops.

I don't see what the problem is here. Do you want me to call them pigs or something?

[Saya]

How about you stop being purposefully inflammatory when you only give a shit what cops do to white hipsters, and ignore that they've been dressing up that way and abusing people of colour far longer?

[Versus]

Originally Posted by Despanan

When did I say they should give up their careers?

Originally Posted by Despanan

Now I've met some good cops, I've even met good cops while protesting. I understand the situation they're in and I sympathize: However the uniform does not relieve them of responsibility for their actions or the actions of their fellows. When they take part in these illegal, corrupt, and nasty activities, when they use that badge and that responsibility as an excuse to squash dissent in an illegal and unethical manner, they deserve at least a little dehumanizing speech. They deserve to feel ashamed to put on that uniform, because they aren't fulfilling the role of a police officer. They are not protecting and serving the people, they are behaving as bullies vandals and mercenaries.

Like Sargent Shamar Thomas says: There is no honor in this.

The fact that their Captains and Commissioners ordered them to do it is problematic. The fact that their union will not back them up of course causes problems for the good, honorable officers who donned that uniform for the right reasons, but at the end of the day they need to be putting pressure on their union and their leadership to change things, because if they don't they're complicit in the actions of their department.

It's all pretty implied, until you out right said it where I bolded. Or maybe you don't realize that doing what you suggested would be an end to their career.

Also: I never said the equipment was the same (You'll recall that I said police are not military) nor does it need to be for my point to be valid.

What point is that?

[AshleyO]

Okay, now BOTH of you guys are throwing me off here.

I don't particularly think the police are what I would consider a replacement standing army against the populous, but Saya is leveling some weird shit as well.

Come clean, guys. Do you think that OWS protests are ALL white hipsters?

Exactly what do you guys mean when you say that?

[Saya]

Originally Posted by AshleyO

Okay, now BOTH of you guys are throwing me off here.

I don't particularly think the police are what I would consider a replacement standing army against the populous, but Saya is leveling some weird shit as well.

Come clean, guys. Do you think that OWS protests are ALL white hipsters?

Exactly what do you guys mean when you say that?

I don't get how since he doesn't witness war crimes that he doesn't want to talk about it, but as a white middle class cisgender male, he feels perfectly comfortable acting like he knows it all about police brutality, when he was fine and dandy ignoring it before.

[Despanan]

Originally Posted by Versus

It's all pretty implied, until you out right said it where I bolded. Or maybe you don't realize that doing what you suggested would be an end to their career.

So, a bunch of cops go to their union and say: "I'm uncomfortable being asked by my command to illegally victimize law-abiding citizens, and I'm uncomfortable with the union supporting those same commanders over me. We need to change our direction because what we're doing is unethical." equals "career death?"

If that's the case then the police have bigger problems thane comparing them to starwars extras.

What point is that?

I said that the militarization of police is a problem. For instance, the fact that they can't disagree with command or file a complaint without risking their careers.

That shit's fucked up, yo.

[Versus]

She said it, not me.

[AshleyO]

Okay, FINE. That's him apparently. But you've been saying for the longest time, Saya, that OWS is JUST white hipsters.

Do you think that there AREN'T any elements of PoC dialogue and feminist dialogue and queer dialogue in OWS? Exactly what do you think OWS is because I get the impression that you're really only half right.