The hallmark of one of those 'Project 100,000' recruits was their inability to manage psychological stress. Psychological stress within the military as is common as hearts beating and breaths taken.
I mentioned in an earlier posting that during my tour of duty is in federal service I was detailed off on TTY to participate in President Gerald Ford's Residential Clemency Board. I was actively engaged in these activities from February 1975 through September of that same year, and my job included preparing case summaries for applicants were presidential clemency, and later supervising a staff of 13 in the paper mill that inevitably followed. While the Clemency Board treated membership in the Project 100,000 cohort as a mitigating factor for those who broke under the tension and stress of military service, there was a distinct lack of empathy among the upper-class members of the president's board for the cumulative effects of inconsistent military discipline, the chaos of war, the fact that it was poorly led, and poorly motivated. Think about those hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers dragged out of the civilian life dragged out of civilian life and thrown into the charnel house that is now Ukraine. Something akin to that was reflected in America's experience in Vietnam.
More recently, your revelation that the Memphis Police Department, among many other law enforcement agencies, have quietly removed the requirement that sworn peace officers have at least a modicum of post high school education. That, coupled with the implicit knowledge that in many communities, high school graduates may only be barely literate, means that candidates for employment for police training may be unteachable, especially in matters involving judgment and discretion. The ability to anticipate and appreciate the consequences of one's actions arising under stressful situations may simply be unattainable for certain individuals, and the more that these individuals, and those who might be able to change their course of action but who are otherwise suggestible, simply because they live in a culture where forethought of consequences is nonexistent means, practically, that street cops are more likely than not to revert to their emotions and preconceptions when dealing with delicate and nuanced situations. We see this all the time, even with experienced officers who, in a moment of crisis, revert to primal instinct in dealing with the situations. The fight or flight instinct is especially dangerous where the peace officer has the power of life and death over members of the public, thanks to the doctrine of qualified immunity. So, instead of cooling temperatures in crisis situations, there instinct is to do the opposite and double down on what is already failing to achieve the desired result. Their own superior officers are products of this culture of shoot first and ask questions later. Couple that with the abysmal hiring standards one tends to find in the rural South, where raw displays of power have long been emblematic of law enforcement involving both Blacks and Whites, there is no reason to believe that the culture of policing as it is now done will be improved anytime soon. It's not a matter of pay and benefits that stymies recruitment, because the candidates who invariably show up all too often include people who are psychologically unfit to be peace officers. Barking orders, kicking ass, and taking names, and sweeping the consequences under the rug has long been the name of the game, and the more lacking they are in supervision, and the more deadly the firepower these officers are equipped with, the more deadly the result will be. These agencies are incapable of changing their behavior, because the political institutions that are in charge are indifferent to the consequences of not changing their own behavior to meet the needs of the people to whom they are representing, and to whom they are responsible ultimately at the polls.
A keyword in your essay about lowering of standards is this: "unteachable". In the great book about Project 100,000, McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War by Hamilton Gregory, is the extreme difficulty the Army had in training these men. Eventually, they had to be "trained" separately in special companies. Gregory writes that at least 55% of them were placed in the infantry and sent to Vietnam. They had a disproportionate KIA rate. My Advisory Team had a few of them; I don't think they could read or write; they were put on permanent guard duty and never sent on operations.
One other thing: the number of the defective soldiers ultimately was 355,000, way beyond 100,000. Guys like Trump and Cheney (and a lot of my friends) had better things to do. than join up.
McNamara's actions were totally immoral and criminal. The rest of us were more or less complicit because that's the way the Selective Service System was configured. You can't fight a war with your thumb and little finger while exempting the rest. I was in the USAR for six years of that war. Infantry trained, college student and law student. The government couldn't sell their colonial war by any
other name after Tet, and they violated Americans trust and cost us our self-confidence and trust in each other. Lyndon Baines Johnson was afraid of losing Vietnam to communists after we had manipulated the aftermath of the French army's defeat in 1954. We backed into the war on the basis of vague assertions of support for South Vietnam's sovereignty as an independent state, and we backfilled those diplomatic efforts by supplying arms to the Saigon government. That effort ultimately failed. We repeated the military intervention that we had done in the Philippines 1899-1904. Times change, and by 1975 the American public had had enough.
Our commitment to South Vietnam had been purely ideological, and Vietnam was peripheral to American strategic and national interests.
I've posted earlier (and, I believe, in another Substack) that a good friend of mine has a nephew who's a Sergeant in the NYPD, which means that he supervises a whole precinct. for a while, the cops working under him were coming in with t-shirts saying things like "Justice for Ashli Babbit." he finally got pissed off and gave the order that they had to stop doing it, adding that "she already got her justice." the result was that he got some anonymous death threats.
there are plenty of excellent cops in the NYPD, which some people consider to be a better police department than exists in some other big American cities. but the PBA is as foul ball an outfit as I can imagine, and mob mentality is mob mentality, whenever and wherever it occurs. the fact that police departments inherit a lot of actual military gear makes things exponentially worse. I don't think I can even count the times I've seen police, expecting some difficulty, cover their shield numbers and names before anything happens.
right now, the fact that the mayor is an ex-cop (in thrall to to the big real estate assholes as well, but that's a different issue) doesn't help the situation HERE.
I'm not familiar with the facts of Ashli Babbitt, so I could not venture even a guess about what this is all about. All I know is, there are far too many guns out there in the hands of people with itchy trigger fingers, and every once in a while a peace officer gets killed, which is a real shame. California law enforcement officers tend to be a cut above the rest of the pack most places out here in the West, and certainly so with regard to the states of the former Confederacy. The fact that we had to mass shootings two weeks ago within a day to one another is disheartening. As far as scalability goes, per capita incidents of gun violence violence are far lower than elsewhere, and the usual suspects come from places in the San Joaquin Valley or the rural agricultural towns north of here. Most of the gun deaths involved former felons who are legally prohibited from owning a firearm in the first place. On the other hand, automobile accidents and hit-runs seem to be on the upswing. This uptick in bad driving habits is disheartening, because we know better. Or at least we should. Northern California is largely white majority, and drivers in rural towns appear to be more at risk for getting themselves killed. I think part of the problem is impressionistic, because 60 years ago, when I was a young man just starting out, the new cycle was entirely local and we did not have anything like the wall-to-wall newsfeeds that we are exposed to today. The dissonance between the family-friendly non-vehicular news, and the carnage that we are daily reminded of on our state highways may exaggerate the latter, and most probably do. By and large, the good news outweighs the bad, by a large margin, except that the latter invariably involves the flashing lights of emergency vehicles, and the breathless commentary of the local news anchor people were sent out to cover the story. Maybe, just once in a while, they'll to send those emergency vehicles, with the rotating beacon lights, out to a bake sale or some high school event, which is mostly what living around here is all about. For myself, there is not another place in this world that I would rather be than here.
Ashli Babbitt's the ex-AF woman who was shot by the police on January 6th. her "murder" has become a talking point for the Right. a week or so ago, when Tyre Nichols was mentioned during a committee meeting, MTG said it was a real pity but "what about somebody who was REALLY murdered...Ashli Babbitt!" the implication, is that Tyre Nichols wasn't actually murdered. she then proceeded to call out Babbitt's mother, who's shown up for this precise purpose more than once.
and according to a long article in the last Atlantic, MTG (aka Goongirl) grew up in a "sundown town."
The woman was actively participating in an active assault on the Capitol on January 6, and she was actively attempting to forcibly enter a portion of the Capitol in which a line of police officers were actively resisting the intruders. That's a far cry from someone who was apparently selected for police harassment at random, and who was fatally injured while attempting to defend himself against physical assault by five rogue police officers. Babbitt's mother's grief is understandable, but she's also showed herself to be the ultimate Karen self-entitled white woman outraged at her daughter's death, a death that was characterized by armed assault on the Capitol, and as a product of a seditious conspiracy by those who could not abide the thought that they were defeated in a recent election. Correlating the two deaths is a false equivalence, something Republicans of all stripes find to be predictably easy to do.
Having spent most of my adult life working for police agencies or associated with the policing world, you have Sussed this problem out perfectly. Add in the difficulty of recruiting people to do this challenging and thankless work in all jurisdictions you have ready made horrors
It's like giving the kids Christmas presents and expecting Miss Kubelik won' t dare call that day, to refer to that brilliant film The Apartment. "Ready made horrors" on stilts, no less.
Lucian... my understanding from various news reports that the EMTs were on the scene for 19 minutes and gave no aid to Tyre Nichols during those minutes. This to me is one of the most obscene, criminal, sadistic, actions/non-actions during the entire grotesque torture and murder of this young man. This I took from contemporaneous new reports. And to me the most horrifying "detail" of all. Am I correct? Let me know what you know.
That is accurate. A fire engine company with three personnel having EMT-Basic level licensure arrived as an initial EMS response (the fourth, a driver, wasn't obligated to deliver medical care in this case). The company officer, one of the EMTs with a duty to act, never dismounted from the apparatus. The two additional EMTs from the fire engine neglected their patient, Mr. Nichols, until an ALS ambulance bearing Paramedic-level responders arrived and initiated care and transport.
The two firefighters have been fired. The officer was allowed to retire.
Thanks for the information, Gordon. The very thought that those at the scene with EMT-Basic Level training and licensing did fuck-all to come to the aid of a direly injured man is incomprehensible to me. The officer with a duty to act did not act. 20 minutes went by. (Almost any civilian who happened by the gruesome scene I trust would have gone to Nichol's aid.) May those who sat by, took photographs, and watched a man die, burn in the hell of what I hope is some shred of guilt and shame that haunts them forever.
they're going to get shitcanned as well (several already have been). but that's not going to help Tyre Nichols or his grieving family. the collusion between the cops and EMTs (who are NOT part of the department) is an obscenity.
Police recruiters give veterans preference in hiring, especially those who served in MP or Shore Patrol (SP). My nearly 5 years active duty experience, 1964-69, was that many of those guys loved to push around enlisted soldiers and sailors who got even slightly out of line. Those types who then join civilian police departments continue to carry that "us versus them" attitude into their daily police work. The sergeant cop (later convicted), Derek Chauvin, who kneeled on George Floyd's neck for 9 minutes went into the Army Reserves, and did two tours with the MP. He was in the Reserves for 18 years; his final rank was E-4. In effect, he got one promotion in 18 years.
Why did the Army Reserves keep him?! Chauvin was a terrible soldier and a worse policeman.
I'd love to know the Military backgrounds of each one of these dismissed or suspended Memphis cops. What do they have in common?
do you mean ASIDE from the fact that if they were applying for the vast majority of employment opportunities out there, those applications would be quickly consigned to what some of my old teachers referred to as "the circular file?"
or do you mean the fact that they tend to be a little TOO interested in controlling other people because they themselves have chronic difficulties controlling themselves?
or do you mean that they seem to demonstrate an excessive interest in weapons?
or do you mean a combination of all three of the above?
or do you mean something else?
I wish I could forget about the expression on Chauvin's face while he was murdering George Floyd; to me, it said something like "keep looking at me like that and YOU'RE NEXT."
The solution is to hold management accountable. Until the chiefs and city councils and mayors are indicted for the crime, nothing will change. Middle management and the workers take all the heat while the people who have the power to actually change things skate. It was ever thus.
This makes sense to me, but I'm not an expert by any means. I doubt this would ever happen. Dehumanization seems to be a huge part of our culture. I suspect you would see a good deal of it in warehouses, such as Amazon, and in the sorting processes of UPS, and even in our Schools.
isn't there some talk about a so-called "compromise" brewing in Congress over the issue of ending Qualified Immunity by making it possible to sue departments but not individual cops? or is this the scumbags just blowing more smoke up our collective asses?
Abu Ghraib was run by an Army Reserve Military Police unit. It was from the American South and had an extraordinary number of psychopaths and not a single officer with any moral compass.
Fixing policing? Requiring a 4 year degree in Criminal Justice. Getting rid of Qualified Immunity, which Congress can do. Making the police union pay for settlements out of the union funds.
Oh yes, and pass stricter gun laws. Missouri for instance, lets teens walk around in public w/AR-15s. Is that insane or what. SMDH...
How about raising police pay and raising the standards? Make it more professional instead of attracting the high school bullies and other leftovers. Taxpayers would surely squawk but you get what you pay for.
And something that came up on Twitter last week. Remove enforcement of traffic laws from police responsibility. Maybe upgraded meter maids for this task.There's also been talk in Seattle about deploying an unarmed team of mental health professionals on domestic disturbance and mental health 911 calls.
The last Police Chief here in Louisville, KY had the police stand down from traffic offences, probably saved lives. The down side, unless you're driving a tank, you're at risk on the street. Unarmed mental health professionals would be a step in the right direction. Improving mental health care, to not only make it affordable, but also to provide it in a way that is easily accessible, destigmatize it.
It is beyond special when the comments to your Substack so greatly enrich the experience, Lucian. It is a tribute to you that your blog has attracted the quality of audience that we here have the privilege of enjoying!
The Memphis Police Department acknowledges that no evidence (a/v or witness testimony) supports the officers initial claims of reasons for having stopped Mr. Nichols.
The MPD officer selected this kind, gentle person for terroristic acts of intimidation.
Return to administering the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory to find the sociopaths and psychopaths before they are assigned guns. Bravo Lucian...
I am not a psychologist but I was required to take the MMPI for various military and civilian law enforcement jobs. My understanding is the test is used to determine a candidate’s “suitability” for a particular position; not to detect mental illness.
“The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is a psychological test that assesses personality traits and psychopathology. It is primarily intended to test people who are suspected of having mental health or other clinical issues.“. They were looking to see if you were psychologically suited for a job.
You may be referring to the MBTI, the Myers’ Briggs Personality Type Indicator which is less reliable than a horoscope, and has absolutely NO validity in job placement; however, companies think it is swell which makes it the best marketed assessment in the world.
“Ten clinical scales (as found in the original MMPI) are used in assessment, and are as follows: hypochondriasis, depression, hysteria, psychopathic deviate, masculinity-femininity, paranoia, psychasthenia, schizophrenia, mania, and social introversion.”
I would argue, Your Honor, that every really interesting artist is depressed. Hopefully not suicidally depressed, Your Eminence, but indubitably, wondering why so many people are so mean-spirited, so much of the time.
Ergo, art and music and drama and romantic, desperate love between people who should know better.
So of course as you already know, that MMPI is pretty bogus. When I was presented with it at Macalester, I corrected the more tendentious questions "between the lines." I wasn't kicked out of school, mind you, but a few years later NO MORE MMPI. I am sure it was well-intended, but come on.
it's pretty well known among certain mental health professionals that it's possible for a thoughtful, skilled sociopath to fool the MMPI. I actually learned about this stuff when I was taking a bunch of courses at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (which is a very impressive school, btw), where the classes were all at least one-half police. some very good, very smart guys among those cops, and when I'd have coffee with them after class, they were full of horror stories about colleagues; sometimes, the blue wall really does lift.
Keep in mind that what happened in Memphis - and everywhere else - is a sign not of failure but of success. The peasants are supposed to kill each other. It's why some of them are given guns and badges in the first place...
Local department policies and procedures designed to suppress crime along with community partnership programs are vital and important building blocks in making our neighborhoods safe. However, in my opinion if meaningful police reform is going to happen the three areas listed are the important drivers of change.
If the right person is hired, trained and supervised then the policing methods and techniques (with a few exceptions that don’t belong in a civilian law enforcement agency) become less problematic. As the Memphis officers stand trial, each one could be a case study in how the system failed the citizens and ultimately Tyre Nichols.
After law school, I made exactly ONE citizens' arrest in Minneapolis. There was, on Franklin Avenue, a liquor store (Zipps) across the street from the local branch of a clinic, Riverside. Not far from the University campus, from the mighty Mississippi Riv, you get the picture. Drunks and cute nursing students, what could go wrong.
Fortunately what I saw was the nurse just escaping the drunk, but I figured "this guy poses a threat," called the cops from a phone booth.
They showed up in minutes (this was 1995) and that was that, for ME.
I have great respect for competent cops, I don't really even know what we would do without them.
As part of the militarization of police many are learning their tactics and attitudes from Israel’s police and military. Trainers have been brought here offering a complete training package (for a price) from Israel, and some police have been sent to Israel for training. The Israelis see all non-police as the enemy. and treat them accordingly. They aren’t interested in ‘serving’ the public. They are trained to dominate, by whatever means, every public encounter. Total control and total obedience to their commands is what they are trained to demand. I have witnessed it in Israel, and was subjected to it once in the states by a young woman officer determined to escalate a silly traffic stop into a major confrontation. (I reported the incident to her superiors, but nothing ever came of it because I didn’t live in that town.) Instead of deescalating potentially bad situations, officers so trained, often drunk on their power, escalate them into murderous tragedies, as happened in Memphis. The obvious answer is to stop using the Israeli model of policing. Lax recruitment requirements are also a major component of the police who turn out to be sadistic psychopaths. Thorough psychological vetting to weed out those who should never have police powers can’t happen when communities are willing to slap a badge and a gun on anyone who walks in the door and says “I want to be a cop”. One way to get good people is to pay them well, and police in many instances are paid very well because they have strong unions. But the unions are often a big part of the problem. They create a culture of impunity by controlling the disciplinary process to protect their members from any meaningful accountability. There are laws that grant police ‘qualified immunity’ from prosecution and suit. Ultimately, many elected officials who control budgets, the hiring of police commanders, and negotiate union contracts, won’t rein in a police department out of control for fear of electoral consequences. I know of one town in the NYC suburbs that in desperation disbanded its police department entirely because it had become a menace to the town’s residents. The townspeople weren’t going to take it anymore. National standard-setting legislation would certainly help, but with the House in Rethug hands there’s no chance that will happen in the next two years. Until we have such legislation there will be more Memphis-like, and George Floyd-like incidents. Like mass shootings, we will normalize them.
In the 1960's Britian started a program to enlist men of color to bring an assumed better service and a more tolerant mindset. It was a disaster. Young men living lives of desperation and suffering the effects of prejudice used the policeman's badge as a cover for revenge and cruelty. The US attempted to offer police work to Black men, ignoring the obvious. TV stereotypes of Mr. Tibbs only created strain and eventual abuse. Idealism never creates progress. Sadism is a fact in most public service organizations, especially juvenile detention centers. There are no shortcuts to quality service.
Eventually enough Americans will get upset and vote to get the police out of monitoring traffic and create enhance psychological interventions. George Floyd's death created a response, tragically it might take several more outrages to stop public tolerance of brutality.
The hallmark of one of those 'Project 100,000' recruits was their inability to manage psychological stress. Psychological stress within the military as is common as hearts beating and breaths taken.
I mentioned in an earlier posting that during my tour of duty is in federal service I was detailed off on TTY to participate in President Gerald Ford's Residential Clemency Board. I was actively engaged in these activities from February 1975 through September of that same year, and my job included preparing case summaries for applicants were presidential clemency, and later supervising a staff of 13 in the paper mill that inevitably followed. While the Clemency Board treated membership in the Project 100,000 cohort as a mitigating factor for those who broke under the tension and stress of military service, there was a distinct lack of empathy among the upper-class members of the president's board for the cumulative effects of inconsistent military discipline, the chaos of war, the fact that it was poorly led, and poorly motivated. Think about those hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers dragged out of the civilian life dragged out of civilian life and thrown into the charnel house that is now Ukraine. Something akin to that was reflected in America's experience in Vietnam.
More recently, your revelation that the Memphis Police Department, among many other law enforcement agencies, have quietly removed the requirement that sworn peace officers have at least a modicum of post high school education. That, coupled with the implicit knowledge that in many communities, high school graduates may only be barely literate, means that candidates for employment for police training may be unteachable, especially in matters involving judgment and discretion. The ability to anticipate and appreciate the consequences of one's actions arising under stressful situations may simply be unattainable for certain individuals, and the more that these individuals, and those who might be able to change their course of action but who are otherwise suggestible, simply because they live in a culture where forethought of consequences is nonexistent means, practically, that street cops are more likely than not to revert to their emotions and preconceptions when dealing with delicate and nuanced situations. We see this all the time, even with experienced officers who, in a moment of crisis, revert to primal instinct in dealing with the situations. The fight or flight instinct is especially dangerous where the peace officer has the power of life and death over members of the public, thanks to the doctrine of qualified immunity. So, instead of cooling temperatures in crisis situations, there instinct is to do the opposite and double down on what is already failing to achieve the desired result. Their own superior officers are products of this culture of shoot first and ask questions later. Couple that with the abysmal hiring standards one tends to find in the rural South, where raw displays of power have long been emblematic of law enforcement involving both Blacks and Whites, there is no reason to believe that the culture of policing as it is now done will be improved anytime soon. It's not a matter of pay and benefits that stymies recruitment, because the candidates who invariably show up all too often include people who are psychologically unfit to be peace officers. Barking orders, kicking ass, and taking names, and sweeping the consequences under the rug has long been the name of the game, and the more lacking they are in supervision, and the more deadly the firepower these officers are equipped with, the more deadly the result will be. These agencies are incapable of changing their behavior, because the political institutions that are in charge are indifferent to the consequences of not changing their own behavior to meet the needs of the people to whom they are representing, and to whom they are responsible ultimately at the polls.
A keyword in your essay about lowering of standards is this: "unteachable". In the great book about Project 100,000, McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War by Hamilton Gregory, is the extreme difficulty the Army had in training these men. Eventually, they had to be "trained" separately in special companies. Gregory writes that at least 55% of them were placed in the infantry and sent to Vietnam. They had a disproportionate KIA rate. My Advisory Team had a few of them; I don't think they could read or write; they were put on permanent guard duty and never sent on operations.
One other thing: the number of the defective soldiers ultimately was 355,000, way beyond 100,000. Guys like Trump and Cheney (and a lot of my friends) had better things to do. than join up.
McNamara's actions were totally immoral and criminal. The rest of us were more or less complicit because that's the way the Selective Service System was configured. You can't fight a war with your thumb and little finger while exempting the rest. I was in the USAR for six years of that war. Infantry trained, college student and law student. The government couldn't sell their colonial war by any
other name after Tet, and they violated Americans trust and cost us our self-confidence and trust in each other. Lyndon Baines Johnson was afraid of losing Vietnam to communists after we had manipulated the aftermath of the French army's defeat in 1954. We backed into the war on the basis of vague assertions of support for South Vietnam's sovereignty as an independent state, and we backfilled those diplomatic efforts by supplying arms to the Saigon government. That effort ultimately failed. We repeated the military intervention that we had done in the Philippines 1899-1904. Times change, and by 1975 the American public had had enough.
Our commitment to South Vietnam had been purely ideological, and Vietnam was peripheral to American strategic and national interests.
I've posted earlier (and, I believe, in another Substack) that a good friend of mine has a nephew who's a Sergeant in the NYPD, which means that he supervises a whole precinct. for a while, the cops working under him were coming in with t-shirts saying things like "Justice for Ashli Babbit." he finally got pissed off and gave the order that they had to stop doing it, adding that "she already got her justice." the result was that he got some anonymous death threats.
there are plenty of excellent cops in the NYPD, which some people consider to be a better police department than exists in some other big American cities. but the PBA is as foul ball an outfit as I can imagine, and mob mentality is mob mentality, whenever and wherever it occurs. the fact that police departments inherit a lot of actual military gear makes things exponentially worse. I don't think I can even count the times I've seen police, expecting some difficulty, cover their shield numbers and names before anything happens.
right now, the fact that the mayor is an ex-cop (in thrall to to the big real estate assholes as well, but that's a different issue) doesn't help the situation HERE.
I'm not familiar with the facts of Ashli Babbitt, so I could not venture even a guess about what this is all about. All I know is, there are far too many guns out there in the hands of people with itchy trigger fingers, and every once in a while a peace officer gets killed, which is a real shame. California law enforcement officers tend to be a cut above the rest of the pack most places out here in the West, and certainly so with regard to the states of the former Confederacy. The fact that we had to mass shootings two weeks ago within a day to one another is disheartening. As far as scalability goes, per capita incidents of gun violence violence are far lower than elsewhere, and the usual suspects come from places in the San Joaquin Valley or the rural agricultural towns north of here. Most of the gun deaths involved former felons who are legally prohibited from owning a firearm in the first place. On the other hand, automobile accidents and hit-runs seem to be on the upswing. This uptick in bad driving habits is disheartening, because we know better. Or at least we should. Northern California is largely white majority, and drivers in rural towns appear to be more at risk for getting themselves killed. I think part of the problem is impressionistic, because 60 years ago, when I was a young man just starting out, the new cycle was entirely local and we did not have anything like the wall-to-wall newsfeeds that we are exposed to today. The dissonance between the family-friendly non-vehicular news, and the carnage that we are daily reminded of on our state highways may exaggerate the latter, and most probably do. By and large, the good news outweighs the bad, by a large margin, except that the latter invariably involves the flashing lights of emergency vehicles, and the breathless commentary of the local news anchor people were sent out to cover the story. Maybe, just once in a while, they'll to send those emergency vehicles, with the rotating beacon lights, out to a bake sale or some high school event, which is mostly what living around here is all about. For myself, there is not another place in this world that I would rather be than here.
Ashli Babbitt's the ex-AF woman who was shot by the police on January 6th. her "murder" has become a talking point for the Right. a week or so ago, when Tyre Nichols was mentioned during a committee meeting, MTG said it was a real pity but "what about somebody who was REALLY murdered...Ashli Babbitt!" the implication, is that Tyre Nichols wasn't actually murdered. she then proceeded to call out Babbitt's mother, who's shown up for this precise purpose more than once.
and according to a long article in the last Atlantic, MTG (aka Goongirl) grew up in a "sundown town."
The woman was actively participating in an active assault on the Capitol on January 6, and she was actively attempting to forcibly enter a portion of the Capitol in which a line of police officers were actively resisting the intruders. That's a far cry from someone who was apparently selected for police harassment at random, and who was fatally injured while attempting to defend himself against physical assault by five rogue police officers. Babbitt's mother's grief is understandable, but she's also showed herself to be the ultimate Karen self-entitled white woman outraged at her daughter's death, a death that was characterized by armed assault on the Capitol, and as a product of a seditious conspiracy by those who could not abide the thought that they were defeated in a recent election. Correlating the two deaths is a false equivalence, something Republicans of all stripes find to be predictably easy to do.
"New Yawk, New Yawk, the town so nice they named it twice!"
But seriously, yes.
Lucian writes great articles and then this kind of excellence is added to it.
Thank you.
Having spent most of my adult life working for police agencies or associated with the policing world, you have Sussed this problem out perfectly. Add in the difficulty of recruiting people to do this challenging and thankless work in all jurisdictions you have ready made horrors
It's like giving the kids Christmas presents and expecting Miss Kubelik won' t dare call that day, to refer to that brilliant film The Apartment. "Ready made horrors" on stilts, no less.
Lucian... my understanding from various news reports that the EMTs were on the scene for 19 minutes and gave no aid to Tyre Nichols during those minutes. This to me is one of the most obscene, criminal, sadistic, actions/non-actions during the entire grotesque torture and murder of this young man. This I took from contemporaneous new reports. And to me the most horrifying "detail" of all. Am I correct? Let me know what you know.
That is accurate. A fire engine company with three personnel having EMT-Basic level licensure arrived as an initial EMS response (the fourth, a driver, wasn't obligated to deliver medical care in this case). The company officer, one of the EMTs with a duty to act, never dismounted from the apparatus. The two additional EMTs from the fire engine neglected their patient, Mr. Nichols, until an ALS ambulance bearing Paramedic-level responders arrived and initiated care and transport.
The two firefighters have been fired. The officer was allowed to retire.
Thanks for the information, Gordon. The very thought that those at the scene with EMT-Basic Level training and licensing did fuck-all to come to the aid of a direly injured man is incomprehensible to me. The officer with a duty to act did not act. 20 minutes went by. (Almost any civilian who happened by the gruesome scene I trust would have gone to Nichol's aid.) May those who sat by, took photographs, and watched a man die, burn in the hell of what I hope is some shred of guilt and shame that haunts them forever.
"allowed to retire." with his pension and health insurance? I sure as shit hope not. but I bet he's got it all.
Oh, he does. It’s called “resign/retire in lieu of termination.”
This was a lynching. The picture looks like so many others. I sincerely hope those cops don’t see the light of day for many, many years.
TOTALLY right.. the LYNCHING mentality is “alive and well” in America.
And remembering that the police institution was basically created to keep ex-slaves in their place “lynching” Heartbreak !!
they're going to get shitcanned as well (several already have been). but that's not going to help Tyre Nichols or his grieving family. the collusion between the cops and EMTs (who are NOT part of the department) is an obscenity.
Police recruiters give veterans preference in hiring, especially those who served in MP or Shore Patrol (SP). My nearly 5 years active duty experience, 1964-69, was that many of those guys loved to push around enlisted soldiers and sailors who got even slightly out of line. Those types who then join civilian police departments continue to carry that "us versus them" attitude into their daily police work. The sergeant cop (later convicted), Derek Chauvin, who kneeled on George Floyd's neck for 9 minutes went into the Army Reserves, and did two tours with the MP. He was in the Reserves for 18 years; his final rank was E-4. In effect, he got one promotion in 18 years.
Why did the Army Reserves keep him?! Chauvin was a terrible soldier and a worse policeman.
I'd love to know the Military backgrounds of each one of these dismissed or suspended Memphis cops. What do they have in common?
do you mean ASIDE from the fact that if they were applying for the vast majority of employment opportunities out there, those applications would be quickly consigned to what some of my old teachers referred to as "the circular file?"
or do you mean the fact that they tend to be a little TOO interested in controlling other people because they themselves have chronic difficulties controlling themselves?
or do you mean that they seem to demonstrate an excessive interest in weapons?
or do you mean a combination of all three of the above?
or do you mean something else?
I wish I could forget about the expression on Chauvin's face while he was murdering George Floyd; to me, it said something like "keep looking at me like that and YOU'RE NEXT."
The solution is to hold management accountable. Until the chiefs and city councils and mayors are indicted for the crime, nothing will change. Middle management and the workers take all the heat while the people who have the power to actually change things skate. It was ever thus.
This makes sense to me, but I'm not an expert by any means. I doubt this would ever happen. Dehumanization seems to be a huge part of our culture. I suspect you would see a good deal of it in warehouses, such as Amazon, and in the sorting processes of UPS, and even in our Schools.
isn't there some talk about a so-called "compromise" brewing in Congress over the issue of ending Qualified Immunity by making it possible to sue departments but not individual cops? or is this the scumbags just blowing more smoke up our collective asses?
I'm pretty sure the question answers itself.
Yup.
The idea of taking photos as trophies reminds of the pictures that were taken at Abu Ghraib, as well.
Abu Ghraib was run by an Army Reserve Military Police unit. It was from the American South and had an extraordinary number of psychopaths and not a single officer with any moral compass.
Not a functioning, humanistic moral compass, anyway.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant claimed the the only intrinsically good thing in the entire universe, is a good will.
Yes, this is why we study philosophy!
Fixing policing? Requiring a 4 year degree in Criminal Justice. Getting rid of Qualified Immunity, which Congress can do. Making the police union pay for settlements out of the union funds.
Oh yes, and pass stricter gun laws. Missouri for instance, lets teens walk around in public w/AR-15s. Is that insane or what. SMDH...
A couple of ideas come to mind.
How about raising police pay and raising the standards? Make it more professional instead of attracting the high school bullies and other leftovers. Taxpayers would surely squawk but you get what you pay for.
And something that came up on Twitter last week. Remove enforcement of traffic laws from police responsibility. Maybe upgraded meter maids for this task.There's also been talk in Seattle about deploying an unarmed team of mental health professionals on domestic disturbance and mental health 911 calls.
The last Police Chief here in Louisville, KY had the police stand down from traffic offences, probably saved lives. The down side, unless you're driving a tank, you're at risk on the street. Unarmed mental health professionals would be a step in the right direction. Improving mental health care, to not only make it affordable, but also to provide it in a way that is easily accessible, destigmatize it.
It is beyond special when the comments to your Substack so greatly enrich the experience, Lucian. It is a tribute to you that your blog has attracted the quality of audience that we here have the privilege of enjoying!
Tyre Nichols didn't violate any laws.
The Memphis Police Department acknowledges that no evidence (a/v or witness testimony) supports the officers initial claims of reasons for having stopped Mr. Nichols.
The MPD officer selected this kind, gentle person for terroristic acts of intimidation.
Return to administering the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory to find the sociopaths and psychopaths before they are assigned guns. Bravo Lucian...
I am not a psychologist but I was required to take the MMPI for various military and civilian law enforcement jobs. My understanding is the test is used to determine a candidate’s “suitability” for a particular position; not to detect mental illness.
“The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is a psychological test that assesses personality traits and psychopathology. It is primarily intended to test people who are suspected of having mental health or other clinical issues.“. They were looking to see if you were psychologically suited for a job.
You may be referring to the MBTI, the Myers’ Briggs Personality Type Indicator which is less reliable than a horoscope, and has absolutely NO validity in job placement; however, companies think it is swell which makes it the best marketed assessment in the world.
“Ten clinical scales (as found in the original MMPI) are used in assessment, and are as follows: hypochondriasis, depression, hysteria, psychopathic deviate, masculinity-femininity, paranoia, psychasthenia, schizophrenia, mania, and social introversion.”
I would argue, Your Honor, that every really interesting artist is depressed. Hopefully not suicidally depressed, Your Eminence, but indubitably, wondering why so many people are so mean-spirited, so much of the time.
Ergo, art and music and drama and romantic, desperate love between people who should know better.
So of course as you already know, that MMPI is pretty bogus. When I was presented with it at Macalester, I corrected the more tendentious questions "between the lines." I wasn't kicked out of school, mind you, but a few years later NO MORE MMPI. I am sure it was well-intended, but come on.
it's pretty well known among certain mental health professionals that it's possible for a thoughtful, skilled sociopath to fool the MMPI. I actually learned about this stuff when I was taking a bunch of courses at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (which is a very impressive school, btw), where the classes were all at least one-half police. some very good, very smart guys among those cops, and when I'd have coffee with them after class, they were full of horror stories about colleagues; sometimes, the blue wall really does lift.
Keep in mind that what happened in Memphis - and everywhere else - is a sign not of failure but of success. The peasants are supposed to kill each other. It's why some of them are given guns and badges in the first place...
Hiring…Training…Supervising, everything else is on the margin. 30 year retired big city cop here
What do you mean, on the margin?
Local department policies and procedures designed to suppress crime along with community partnership programs are vital and important building blocks in making our neighborhoods safe. However, in my opinion if meaningful police reform is going to happen the three areas listed are the important drivers of change.
If the right person is hired, trained and supervised then the policing methods and techniques (with a few exceptions that don’t belong in a civilian law enforcement agency) become less problematic. As the Memphis officers stand trial, each one could be a case study in how the system failed the citizens and ultimately Tyre Nichols.
After law school, I made exactly ONE citizens' arrest in Minneapolis. There was, on Franklin Avenue, a liquor store (Zipps) across the street from the local branch of a clinic, Riverside. Not far from the University campus, from the mighty Mississippi Riv, you get the picture. Drunks and cute nursing students, what could go wrong.
Fortunately what I saw was the nurse just escaping the drunk, but I figured "this guy poses a threat," called the cops from a phone booth.
They showed up in minutes (this was 1995) and that was that, for ME.
I have great respect for competent cops, I don't really even know what we would do without them.
Thank you.
As part of the militarization of police many are learning their tactics and attitudes from Israel’s police and military. Trainers have been brought here offering a complete training package (for a price) from Israel, and some police have been sent to Israel for training. The Israelis see all non-police as the enemy. and treat them accordingly. They aren’t interested in ‘serving’ the public. They are trained to dominate, by whatever means, every public encounter. Total control and total obedience to their commands is what they are trained to demand. I have witnessed it in Israel, and was subjected to it once in the states by a young woman officer determined to escalate a silly traffic stop into a major confrontation. (I reported the incident to her superiors, but nothing ever came of it because I didn’t live in that town.) Instead of deescalating potentially bad situations, officers so trained, often drunk on their power, escalate them into murderous tragedies, as happened in Memphis. The obvious answer is to stop using the Israeli model of policing. Lax recruitment requirements are also a major component of the police who turn out to be sadistic psychopaths. Thorough psychological vetting to weed out those who should never have police powers can’t happen when communities are willing to slap a badge and a gun on anyone who walks in the door and says “I want to be a cop”. One way to get good people is to pay them well, and police in many instances are paid very well because they have strong unions. But the unions are often a big part of the problem. They create a culture of impunity by controlling the disciplinary process to protect their members from any meaningful accountability. There are laws that grant police ‘qualified immunity’ from prosecution and suit. Ultimately, many elected officials who control budgets, the hiring of police commanders, and negotiate union contracts, won’t rein in a police department out of control for fear of electoral consequences. I know of one town in the NYC suburbs that in desperation disbanded its police department entirely because it had become a menace to the town’s residents. The townspeople weren’t going to take it anymore. National standard-setting legislation would certainly help, but with the House in Rethug hands there’s no chance that will happen in the next two years. Until we have such legislation there will be more Memphis-like, and George Floyd-like incidents. Like mass shootings, we will normalize them.
Horrific photo of Nichols sent as a trophy photo? Repulsive behavior and an obscene disgrace.
In the 1960's Britian started a program to enlist men of color to bring an assumed better service and a more tolerant mindset. It was a disaster. Young men living lives of desperation and suffering the effects of prejudice used the policeman's badge as a cover for revenge and cruelty. The US attempted to offer police work to Black men, ignoring the obvious. TV stereotypes of Mr. Tibbs only created strain and eventual abuse. Idealism never creates progress. Sadism is a fact in most public service organizations, especially juvenile detention centers. There are no shortcuts to quality service.
Eventually enough Americans will get upset and vote to get the police out of monitoring traffic and create enhance psychological interventions. George Floyd's death created a response, tragically it might take several more outrages to stop public tolerance of brutality.