>>> knowing that prosecutors and the courts will almost always give them the
>>> benefit of the doubt even if video evidence shows them to have been in the
>>> wrong. .. (
http://tinyurl.com/yxsr98ls )
>>
>> Police act like laws don't apply to them because of 'qualified immunity.'
>> .. The Supreme Court created qualified immunity in 1982. With that novel
>> invention, the court granted all government officials immunity for
>> violating constitutional and civil rights unless the victims of those
>> violations can show that the rights were "clearly established." .. Although
>> innocuous sounding, the clearly established test is a legal obstacle nearly
>> impossible to overcome. .. (
http://tinyurl.com/ya3ndd4u )
http://tinyurl.com/ydz3mogw
But Democrats .. historically .. were only somewhat less enthusiastic
advocates of mass incarceration and neoliberalism. Today virtually all big
American cities are run by the Democratic Party ..
Big city Democrats have plainly failed to rein in their police departments
or to improve their abysmal job performance. The homicide clearance rate
(that is, the fraction of murders that end in an arrest) in the U.S. has
fallen steadily from over 90 percent in the 1960s, to 69 percent in the
late 90s, to about 62 percent today - even while the murder rate has
fallen by almost half over the last 30 years. In Baltimore, the clearance
rate in 2019 was a mere 32 percent - roughly the fraction of murders that
are typically solved by immediate confession or finding the perpetrator at
the scene. Unbelievably, Chicago police can't even match that figure - in
2019, they boosted their clearance rate to 56 percent by closing many old
cases in which the supposed perpetrator had died or prosecutors refused to
press a case. But of murders committed in that year through December 23,
Chicago cops had cleared only 21 percent.
Yet Democratic city governments continue to spend gigantic sums on law
enforcement. In 2017, Baltimore spent 26 percent of its general revenue
fund on cops; in Minneapolis, 36 percent; in Chicago, 39 percent; and in
Oakland, 41 percent. .. That's America in 2020: a giant chunk of public
dollars going to cops who are shockingly poor at doing their most important
jobs, constantly hassle and occasionally kill people, and react to any
resulting protest with violence. When citizens accurately perceive that the
state is basically hostile to them, one should expect a breakdown of law
and order sooner or later. ..
...