# The Largest Street Gang in America



## Phinn (Apr 18, 2006)

I had trouble getting through more than 15 minutes of it.


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## sowilson (Jul 27, 2009)

It's time for them to wear brown shirts and give funny salutes.


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## ksinc (May 30, 2005)

"To Serve and Protect"


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## Relayer (Nov 9, 2005)

Yes, there are bad people employed as police. Clearly.

Personally, I have never in my 53 years on this earth witnessed anything like what we see in these videos.

The next time I am threaten or see someone else threatened in some way, I'll still call up the local police without hesitation.


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## Mike Petrik (Jul 5, 2005)

Never trust anything that tells only one side. Never. Classic propaganda tactic. Sure police often make mistakes and sometimes misbehave, but one can tell very little from these videos. My suspicion is that some of these vignettes show genuine abuse, others not; but it is very risky to reach conclusions based on a propaganda piece.


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## eagle2250 (Mar 24, 2006)

IMHO, videos such as that referenced in the OP, are generally 10% fact and 90% BS...there is always a back story and it seems, that part just never gets told. Before becoming too judgemental, try walking in a police officer's shoes for a couple of years (or even just a couple of months, weeks...perhaps!). The view is always drastically different from the other side!


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## Howard (Dec 7, 2004)

Wow,this was disturbing.


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## ksinc (May 30, 2005)

I have been in incidents where police did something along those lines twice. It's not a lot of fun to decide whether to get bulldogged or pull a gun on a police officer with no witnesses. In our state it's pretty much go to jail forever if you have a weapon and get in an altercation with a cop no matter what your reason is. OTOH you can't let someone beat the crap out of you in a field in the middle of no where's ville. 

For those that are curious and probably already can guess ... it was of course in Martin County.


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## Asterix (Jun 7, 2005)

Irrespective of whichever percentage of the video compilation is true or false, a cop shouldn't be beating up any citizen for any reason outside of actual self defense and most of those video clips were disturbing.


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## TomK (Nov 18, 2009)

Asterix said:


> Irrespective of whichever percentage of the video compilation is true or false, a cop shouldn't be beating up any citizen for any reason outside of actual self defense and most of those video clips were disturbing.


There are bad apples in any group of people - police included. It is very disturbing though when someone of authority abuses said authority but I am willing to give leeway. We had a police office in Connecitcut that was shot after pulling over a car for speeding. It is a dangerous and stressful job.

Given the number of police and citizen interactions every hour/day/month/year I find the overall performance of the police to be quite admirable. It is a tough job.

One of the worst cases in the video was the cop pulled over for DUI. The officer who pulled over the cop had a safe environment and time to think and still decided he should let the cop go. Many of the other examples shown are police in difficult and stressful situations making decisions on the fly with limited information. How much better would any of us fair on those spots?


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## Asterix (Jun 7, 2005)

TomK said:


> There are bad apples in any group of people - police included. It is very disturbing though when someone of authority abuses said authority but I am willing to give leeway. We had a police office in Connecitcut that was shot after pulling over a car for speeding. It is a dangerous and stressful job.
> 
> Given the number of police and citizen interactions every hour/day/month/year I find the overall performance of the police to be quite admirable. It is a tough job.
> 
> One of the worst cases in the video was the cop pulled over for DUI. The officer who pulled over the cop had a safe environment and time to think and still decided he should let the cop go. *Many of the other examples shown are police in difficult and stressful situations making decisions on the fly with limited information. How much better would any of us fair on those spots?*


I appreciate your response but disagree with the comments in bold. The cops make a living from the taxes of the citizens who they have sworn to serve; safeguard their lives and property; protect the innocent in the community; maintain peace in the community; and ensure the rights of all to liberty, equality and justice within the community. They are supposed to have been trained to handle almost any situation so to use the excuse of a stressful situation as a reason why a cop can/should manhandle a person is unacceptable. If a wait staff at a McDonald's location who after a stressful day of dealing with not so nice customers encounters another annoying customer and then reacts by hacking up phlegm and spitting it into the customer's burger/drink. Are we supposed to overlook that just because he/she had had a bad day or was facing a stressful situation? Training and decorum means certain standards are expected of us in the specific roles we play in the society, and if everyone starts to react thoughtlessly just based on whatever stressful situations they find themselves, we'd have chaos.


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## JohnRov (Sep 3, 2008)

The stress and dangerous duty argument holds little weight with me. They chose their line of work and it's their job to deal with the burdens that come along with it. That said, stuff like that video represent an extreme minority of LEOs.


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## Howard (Dec 7, 2004)

A cop shouldn't be putting their hands on anyone period,the other person has no defense.


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## Jae iLL (Nov 14, 2009)

Mike Petrik said:


> Never trust anything that tells only one side. Never. Classic propaganda tactic. Sure police often make mistakes and sometimes misbehave, but one can tell very little from these videos. My suspicion is that some of these vignettes show genuine abuse, others not; but it is very risky to reach conclusions based on a propaganda piece.


It doesn't matter what the "other side" is. If you see a cop beating or using force on a "suspect" who is not putting the lives of officers or anyone else in danger or being non compliant, then that's all you need to see. I don't care if 5 minutes before that he called the cop a pig or wished death upon his mother, the police are supposed to be trained to handle these situations without losing their composure. I don't care how "stressful" people say their jobs are, in reality their jobs are not that stressful. Most officers never have to unholster their weapon in 20+ year long careers, so no, their lives are not on the line daily.

eagle2250 you stress the video is 10% fact 90%bs, the video is a video. How can it be bs, it's 100% fact, what happened is there captured on footage. The backstory is meaningless, all that matters is what is captured on that video. Even if a suspected criminal was threatening the lives of others or being non compliant and then becomes compliant and is beaten after the fact, that is illegal. However, as you can see in the video, a lot of that footage is just police abusing their power.

I served in the military and the people that served with me and abused their positions of power on people in the desert deserve to be prosecuted just as the terrorists and criminals, cop or not, deserve to be prosecuted.

It's dangerous and stressful to grow up in a housing project, TomK, will you also give leeway to the rapists, drug dealers, gangbangers, and murders? After all, they are in a dangerous and stressful position are they not?


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## eagle2250 (Mar 24, 2006)

^^
Videos can be and regularly are edited to elicit erroneous conclusions...they are frequently not the unassailable bastions of fact that you suggest. You are not the only one who has served, many of us have. and during a career of "serving and protecting", I was assaulted with at least two types of bodily fluids (spit and blood) and had human feces thrown at me on one occasion, was shot at on several occassions, and stabbed by an unhappy citizen on another occasion. So for me, I am still inclined to initially give our police officers the benefit of the doubt and, in those instances they are proven to be in the wrong, hold them fully accountable for their actions. There is plenty of blame to assign on both sides of this issue.


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## norton (Dec 18, 2008)

While I like to hear both sides of the story I have noticed that I am seeing more police who seem to think that those of us who are not on the force are, if not the enemy, are less trustworthy or capable than they. I cringe anytime I hear a police officer refer to a citizen as a "civilian". Unless they're in the military they are civilians too, they just have a governmental entity as an employer.

I don't understand why police forces need sniper rifles when their rules wouldn't allow them to take a shot at extreme ranges.

I don't understand why police officers need fully automatic rifles, "machine guns", when their indiscriminate spray could injure innocent bystanders.

I don't understand why police departments need military surplus equipment like armored personnel carriers.

I don't understand why any non-undercover police officer, especially a SWAT officer, should need to conceal his identity while on duty.

Police have historically been well regarded by the people in this country but I see that changing and I blame the police themselves. They need to police their own ranks better and stop covering for the bad apples. And they need to stop acting like a branch of the military, which we have to protect us from a foreign threat and is prohibited from engaging in domestic police work, and start acting as though they are just like the rest of us, only with more responsibility. They get paid to take on that responsibility, not to have more power.


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## harvey_birdman (Mar 10, 2008)

norton said:


> Police have historically been well regarded by the people in this country but I see that changing and I blame the police themselves. They need to police their own ranks better and stop covering for the bad apples. And they need to stop acting like a branch of the military, which we have to protect us from a foreign threat and is prohibited from engaging in domestic police work, and start acting as though they are just like the rest of us, only with more responsibility. They get paid to take on that responsibility, not to have more power.


^ This.


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## eagle2250 (Mar 24, 2006)

^^


norton said:


> While I like to hear both sides of the story I have noticed that I am seeing more police who seem to think that those of us who are not on the force are, if not the enemy, are less trustworthy or capable than they. I cringe anytime I hear a police officer refer to a citizen as a "civilian". Unless they're in the military they are civilians too, they just have a governmental entity as an employer.
> 
> A: Police develop that mindset because onlookers frequently do misunderstand what they are looking at and frequently do reach conclusions, without being knowledgeable of all the facts. A uniformed officer is a member of a para-military organization, working in an environment that would be found to be totally unacceptable by most "civilians" and living a lifestyle that is frequently forced upon them by certain realities of their job.
> 
> ...


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## norton (Dec 18, 2008)

norton said:


> Police officers in this country have been largely ignored and under-appreciated by most of the population through-out our history. That seemed to change for awile after the 9-11 attack but, we seem, all too quickly, to be returning to a state of benign ignorance and neglect. If we are to asume that our police officers are paid for the responsibilities they regularly shoulder, they are woefully underpaid!
> 
> Just thinkin!


My point about the toys the police get is that I don't believe that the police should be allowed to be better armed than any other law abiding citizen. I don't mind them having automatic weapons, as long as I can have one too. I really want a suppressed MP-5. You'll have to forgive me, I live in Illinois where it seems ownership of a firearm is presumption of guilt. I firmly believe the police have no reason to hide their identity. If they can't protect themselves and their own families how are they going to protect mine? Why are these dangerous criminals being released? And why do they get punished more if they knock on your door than mine? Shouldn't the family of a woman stalked by her homicidal ex husband be protected as much as your family?

There have been too many mistakes made in no knock raids where innocent citizens have been killed by masked men busting down the door in the middle of the night.

As to pay, I suspect some are paid too much and some too little, just like any other job. If you get rid of the ones that are paid too much, improve the quality of the force, you might see pay rise. Although, when non governmental employees look at the pay, benefits and retirement civil servants get, that may be difficult to get voters to approve.

I have known police officers that were a part of their communities and respected the people they worked for who I greatly admire, my brother for one. I have also known police officers that felt the public couldn't be trusted and had a chip on their shoulder. I've shot with a state police officer that couldn't hit a target at ten feet with her service pistol.

There are good cops and bad cops, just like there are good citizens and bad citizens. Good police officers realize they aren't that much different from their neighbors, with more training and experience in some areas and less in others. But some of their neighbors deserve trust and respect and if they don't get it from the cops they won't be trusting or respecting the cops either.

Several years ago I heard a car driving down our street hitting garbage cans and mailboxes. I went out and tried to clean up the neighbors yard in the dark and then went back to bed. When I heard the car coming back I ran out barefoot in my pajamas to try to get his license number. He had run up onto a rock in my neighbors yard and was stuck. I got the number and ran back in to my wife to have her call it into the police before he got unstuck. Then I went back out and found he had abandoned the stuck car. The police came a half hour later and while they were interviewing me at three in the morning in my front hallway, one asks why I didn't just grab the driver.

I didn't know how to answer. It was the middle of the night, dark (no streetlights), and I didn't know who was in the car. I have weapons in the house, but in Illinois if I had taken a gun along the police would have been arresting me.

You can't have it both ways, you either trust the citizens to act responsibly, even when armed, or you don't, in which case you get the job and they aren't in a position to help you. Police can't do it alone, but unless they trust and respect the people they "serve and protect" they'll have to.


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## eagle2250 (Mar 24, 2006)

^^
I'll admit that my experience may have left me somewhat prejudiced in favor of the police. However, it appears that others may harbor biases against our 'Centurions in Blue', based on their unique prejudices, as well! 

PS: What, for heavens sake, would you do with a suppressed MP-5, Norton? :icon_scratch:


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## norton (Dec 18, 2008)

eagle2250 said:


> ^^
> 
> PS: What, for heavens sake, would you do with a suppressed MP-5, Norton? :icon_scratch:


Have fun! What would I do with any gun I own? I shot auto's in the military and my son's and I shot an MP and an Uzi with my brother. You should have seen the boys' faces when they were done.

But I would like the option to use suppressors. I think OSHA should make them a requirement.


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## norton (Dec 18, 2008)

eagle2250 said:


> ^^
> I'll admit that my experience may have left me somewhat prejudiced in favor of the police. However, it appears that others may harbor biases against our 'Centurions in Blue', based on their unique prejudices, as well!


Not to beat this to death, but the point I was trying to make is that the police need the cooperation of law abiding citizens as much as they need the police. That cooperation is only given when the police earn the trust and respect of the community and that is something that administrators and individual officers need to keep in mind when they make decisions.


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## ksinc (May 30, 2005)

Can you by a suppressor in a corporation up there? You can here.


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## norton (Dec 18, 2008)

ksinc said:


> Can you by a suppressor in a corporation up there? You can here.


I believe it may be theoretically possible but the bonding requirement makes it impractical. I looked into it some years ago and decided it just wasn't doable. In Illinois - no carry - no automatics - no suppressors - no AOW - and every gun owner has to register.

Of course, there's always an exception for LEO's.


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## ksinc (May 30, 2005)

norton said:


> I believe it may be theoretically possible but the bonding requirement makes it impractical. I looked into it some years ago and decided it just wasn't doable. In Illinois - no carry - no automatics - no suppressors - no AOW - and every gun owner has to register.
> 
> Of course, there's always an exception for LEO's.


Time to move.


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