The Glade 4.0

Quotas as such are illegal - and actually something that most departments wouldn't try to slide under the radar, either, because trying to enforce a quota on the officers would give them a cause of action against the city. This is why you sometimes see "work slowdowns" as well, rather than strikes.

I think a better approach would be a very tight cap on "court costs" which are really what allow the system to operate in the black, as well as significant reductions in administrative fees. For example, a person getting their license back after a suspension often has to pay both the license bureau as well as the fines and costs for the actual offense. This is a lot of money for working people, and also can be confusing. I've seen people with 3 or 4 active suspensions on their license who don't understand why they can't drive because they took care of one issue.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I am referencing (pardon the source https://sunlightfoundation.com/2016/09/ ... ice-fines/ the National Review has similar articles but it is an old story so they are hard to locate) the DOJ findings from a few years back showing that cities will include in their budget actual $$ values from police fines and then ride the department heads to deliver that revenue.

https://www.governing.com/columns/publi ... -debt.html

Policing is necessary of course, but when a city includes $10M in revenue from policing in it's annual budget that's a problem because policing should never be a source of income for a government agency.

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As the first article points out, it's abnormal for a city to really derive a significant portion of its budget from policing; usually it's around 1%. When it's at 25% as it was in Ferguson, alarm bells should be going off.

The second article makes the point I was getting at: The real cost of a $100 traffic ticket can be much higher (they used $490 as a figure; I won't quibble with that). This is a much more serious problem than revenue generation. A $490 ticket is a serious expense for a LOT of people, most often the same people whose income will be put at risk from traffic offenses, and is really excessive whether the city is making a profit or taking a loss on that amount.

That said, there's also a problem in that people just drive like ****. We have thousands upon thousands of injuries and accidents on the roads every year; it's not as if there's not AMPLE shitty driving out there to be policed.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

This is all quite true.



This is also true, but I think it extends beyond that. If it were simply a matter of addressing concerns common to black Americans, implementing reforms, and coming to mutual understanding this would be sufficient to acknowledge. However, I do not think that the perception of black Americans is something that can be controlled by police reform, for two reasons:

1) The belief in "Racism" is an easy escape from personal accountability. "It's not my fault because..." is one of the most corrosively tempting thoughts there is, and when you have an entire wing of society telling you it's not your fault, it's because of the racists (and not only on the subject of police) its very hard to give that up. There has been immense practical progress on rights and equality for minorities; there have been endless different approaches to police reform in the last 60 years; in the 1980s the cry was that insufficiently vigorous enforcement was racism. No effort results in any reduction in the claims of bias, racism, and mistreatment - because if those claims lessened, some other very hard truths must be confronted.

2) Keeping minorities fearful of police and of racism in general is a priority for the left. Progress is not the goal; if the other side is not the slavering monster of racism, it cannot be used as a reason to frighten people into voting for you. If progress MUST be made, the goal is to ensure that the left gets all credit for it; Tim Scott's bill for example could not get serious consideration because the idea of police reform championed by a Black Republican is a far more terrifying prospect to the left than rioting and burning in any city. This is why there is so much effort in trying to show "unconscious bias" and the like - it solves the problem of Black police officers; who can then be tarred implicitly as "racists" and part of the problem as well rather than the ugly truth that we wouldn't have so many black cops in a racist nation.

Basically, you are right about the perception of black Americans - but unless efforts to address these problems start to be taken in good faith, there will not be progress. The goalposts will never stay still. This is not a matter of everyday Black Americans being unwilling to be reasonable about this; it is a matter of people whose personal identity, source of livelihood, or both are caught up in a civil rights movement that can never end, and never even make meaningful progress, but can also never be abandoned. It is Forever War for sociology and grievance studies majors.



I agree with this. I would say, though, that it goes both ways - just as it does for teachers; I would have made the same comparison. Teachers need a mechanism and an advocate for them against unfounded and unfair complaints from students and parents alike. Many teachers are terrible and should be fired - I know. I went to school. I am very reluctant to cut my children's school district or teachers ANY slack on anything as they have repeatedly demonstrated significant incompetence at basic administration. However, I have also seen other parents and I am no more impressed with them than I am with the school. If allegations are made, the teacher deserves due process, and the allegations and claims of those making them ought to be very closely scrutinized.

The same applies to the police. People in this country understand well that, when in legal trouble, showing impropriety by authorities - police misconduct, violations of rights, failure to afford due process, coercion, etc. - is a potential way to escape or at least mitigate the legal consequences. There is a very strong incentive to make allegations of misconduct. I am generally in favor of abolishing unions as they exist in this country, and I despise teacher's unions. However, both police and teachers I believe than need some other recourse so that they cannot be fired simply to appease the mob. One form of police misconduct that gets little attention is how easy it is (especially in small departments) for command staff to escape responsibility for their own policies, procedures, training, etc. (and ample failures in those areas) by simply throwing some budding LEO to the goats. It ought to, for example, raise our eyebrows that 2 of the officers in the George Floyd case are charged having been on the job for 4 days, because of the actions of an officer with 19 years on the job (not that they are 100% in the clear, but rather that what charges they are facing and why definitely deserves considerable scrutiny.)

I may not be making this especially clear, but this is something very different between law enforcement and the military. In the military, trying to place blame on your subordinates is a quick route to failure, and possibly relief from command. If you've ever watch Jocko Willink's TEDx talk, it explains what I mean. In law enforcement, this mentality is sadly far from pervasive. Since I no longer do actual enforcement myself, and don't carry a badge or a gun anymore, but DO work in a civilian capacity, I see this regularly - supervisors do not take responsibility for their agents in the way NCOs would take responsibility for their Soldiers, and it is really pretty appalling based on how much less a Sergeant gets paid compared to a GS-13. I think this issue is very heavily overlooked in public debate - there is far too much concern about the officer on the street, and until a report like the Ferguson one comes, underlying causes are not addressed because it is far too easy for bosses - uniformed and political - to escape scrutiny.



I would tend to broadly agree with this, although I do not think that most police believe they are in mortal danger at all times, precisely. It is more a matter of going into unknown situations with imperfect or inaccurate information, and having been trained to anticipate the worst-case scenario. That is the point where the "mortal danger" thinking actually kicks in. (This is explicitly in current training models of how to conduct patrol).

I believe that what needs to change is that training needs to focus less on "what if it's the worst case scenario" into "how do I know if it really IS the worst case, and if not, what level of danger am I REALLY in?" and then training more appropriate reactions. This is actually pretty hard to do; we do not want to train complacency either. I focus on guns because my perception is that while lawful weapon possession has become far more normal than it was even 30 years ago, techniques for dealing with it still treat it as though it is of borderline legality (actually, we tend to treat even gun ownership that way). I think that treating guns and other weapons the same as cars would be the right target - a car can be very dangerous, but the reality is that almost no one who a cop stops will attempt to run him over.

As to the job stress, and the formation of bad habits, I would not dismiss the idea of rotating duties but I think some research would be needed on what that should look like for greatest effectiveness.



I'm not aware of any laws that are specifically on the books to allow someone to be charged when another charge can't be brought, except in the UCMJ where there are 2: The General Article (134) and Conduct Unbecoming An Officer And A Gentleman (133) which does not apply to enlisted personnel. Neither of these would be even slightly Constitutional in civilian life.

I do agree, though, that there are a lot of laws that can and do have that effect. As for tickets, I don't think that would quite work out; the police would simply not detect offenses they don't want to give tickets for. That might be a good thing, though; fewer breaks might mean better driving and it would cut down the perception of "driving while black" stops. I hate hearing that; it does happen, but it's rare that you get a good look at a driver before stopping them and almost never after dark. This is another of those behaviors that reform must be accompanied by abandoning the assumption of bad faith on the other end - if everyone gets a ticket when stopped now, there's no more "Driving While Black" excuse. He wrote what offense you committed on the ticket and you can take him to court, so put up or shut up.



I'm reluctant to endorse a generalized "level of violence", but I would suggest that if we are going to have a generally lower level of police engagement in life, then we need to provide citizens with greater legal latitude to protect themselves, their families, and property.

One thing I would suggest is that, if there is a riot, summoning the National Guard and having the Sheriff call able-bodied adults to come armed and ready to serve as militia should be REQUIRED - and allowing the riot or insurrection to persist should be treated as dereliction of duty by the authorities in that area.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

My point about the speeding ticket was not really about having cops write fewer tickets, or mandating that they always write a ticket when they pull someone over. It was an example of selective enforcement of law that nearly everyone has been on both sides of, and can easily understand. The police have many things they can bust you for, but usually choose not to, because doing that would be a dick move. This raises the question of why those things are crimes in the first place? When you re-evaluate that, you will surely come to the conclusion that, yes, some of these things really should be crimes and should be enforced more often, but there are others that serve no practical purpose other than to allow a police officer to express a grudge. The latter should go away.

That concept of "fairness" has broader applications. Police reform would be a much less contentious issue if it were more generalized. BLM activists hate to hear it, but white people are shot by the police at slightly higher rates than black people. The difference, though, is not particularly large. Rather than accusing their critics of racism, it would have been far more productive to ask, "Why is that acceptable?" The arguments that black people are killed by police at an unacceptable rate and that white people are killed by the police at a higher rate than black people are not incompatible with one another.

As to a generalized level of violence, I stand by my original statement. It has become clear to me that we have a statistically significant portion of 20-somethings who have no respect for other people's capacity for violence. I think this is because we have instilled upon them that we all believe violence is always wrong in all cases, and therefore no violence will be visited upon them for even the worst behavior. This needs to change. "If I did that, I might get my *** kicked," needs to become part of the moral calculus once more.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

You guys are agreeing way too much for Hellfire. If someone doesn't call their opponent a **** soon I'm gonna lose my mind. Where's Monty when you need a jerk-ass to annoy everyone. I wonder what protest he's been bringing his fencing sword to?

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I see. I would partially agree, although I would say that a lot of "dick move" offenses are also kind of a dick move to commit in the first place.


They are not incompatible, but they require either a third argument that people of both those races are being shot by the police too much, or else that it's inherently worse if it is a black person. They do not want to make the former argument because it means acknowledging that the problem is not racism - which again, also requires acknowledging some other truths they'd rather not. They'd rather not make the second argument (although occasionally someone tries to have a go at it) because it's clearly a racist argument of its own.

I would say that in evaluating this, first of all, the habit of looking at a lot of anecdotes and then deciding "gee this happens too much!" needs to be the first thing to go. This is an exceedingly large country. Even if a police shooting happens every single day somewhere in the country that still represents a very rare event. We also need to look at under what circumstances do these happen? The most spectacularly unjustified police shootings are not the normal ones.



There is a lot of truth to that, although I think that simple wider implementation of "stand your ground" laws could largely cover that.

I would also point out that a lot of those same people are very quick to make near-threats themselves they have no intention of following through on, because not only do they not understand other people's capacity for violence, they have little respect for the fact that there are a lot of people better at - and specifically, more efficient at - violence than they are. People with big mouths generally don't get that violence on the street can escalate a lot farther than mere ass-kicking territory. I have gotten to be pretty good at violence over the course of my life. Not great, but significantly better than average. That, however, has also taught me that there are people a hell of a lot better at it than I am. This is something an *** kicking can teach. Not understanding it, however, can end up being fatal.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

We're just getting too old for that ****.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

There's something to that. I'm damned near 40.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Hey, me too! I can see my death from here.

For the avrg person, they're just choosing the popular thing to beleive that will make them a "good person." For the revolutionary people, it's all about power and playing the common man against himself. So we'll never see reform unless a miracle happens. The Cathedral will ride this flaming train right into oblivion.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Allow me to break up that illusion by stating this is the single dumbest **** I have ever heard in my life:



You want the Sheriff to summon armed civilians and essentially deputize them with the right to kill and shoot fellow citizens? This is the kind of thinking that gives gun-wankers the biggest of hard-ons. This line of thinking is what gets the Proud-boys and Patriot Prayer groups showing up to protests with AR15s and eventually leads to shootings like recently occurred in Kenosha.

Guns for self-protection are one thing, privately armed amateur militias showing up to protect... "stuff" or "protect the peace" are literally just well-armed mobs looking for an excuse to conduct a modern day lynching.

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The distressed wailing about right-wing groups notwithstanding, the leftists are essentially being allowed to do as they please in at least some places. When right-wingers show up and try to play by the same rules, for some reason its suddenly a crisis. If we didn't have places like Portland and Seattle trying to have it both ways and letting leftist whackjobs run loose, we wouldn't see any right-wingers showing up there either. Scary Black Rifles are not an excuse for the double standard.

As for what you're talking about, that's not a militia in the proper sense, and the individual in Kenosha wasn't deputized. Militia here means a militia constituted in law. It is not enough for a Sheriff to simply slap badges on people. Maybe I should have spelled this out more, but the requirement is for the Sheriff to summon the militia and have it ready - not to employ it in any particular fashion. His other requirement is to ensure the riot is suppressed in short order. The militia is a show of force; it is not intended to go out there and take the lead in suppressing the riot. It is better employed by simply being present - and under the control of some leadership, rather than being a bunch of individuals running round at a protest doing whatever. If the militia present is attacked, it can defend itself and do so under the auspices of proper authority.

I would also point out that the objection about "fellow citizens" goes both ways - people rioting, looting, and committing arson and in some cases murder cannot then hide behind that excuse. The militia, under the Sheriff, is the right to self-defense organized and executed collectively. I think it is better if people do it in an organized fashion under the auspices of an authority that can hold excesses to account than leaving it to people to protect themselves individually, and then forcing them to defend themselves legally afterwards when the same people rioting and looting go and lawyer up and suddenly become "mostly peaceful protestors."



I don't think that lynching's are the goal - a fight probably is, but much like chimpanzees engaging in dominance contests usually people back down before anyone gets hurt. As for Kenosha, the supposedly right-wing kid was clearly being attacked by people using his possession of a rifle as an excuse. "Right-wing militias" real or imaginary are no excuse for any of the behaviors of the left.

I should also point out that neither Sheriff-led militias nor the amateur-club ones will be a problem if rioting and violent protests are dealt with promptly. If, when things get out of hand, the National Guard is promptly deployed and the riots disbursed then there's no need to call up any militias, and no one for the fake ones to fight when they arrive - unless they want to fight the NG themselves, which will not end well.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The "right wing" of the USA are the Washington Generals of politics. I'm no more afraid of them than Ebola.

I wasn't thinking very far ahead, but I may have stumbled upon a good analogy. Nazi/KKK may be disgusting in it's acute cases, but widespread cases of it in modernity are exceedingly unlikely.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Pretty apt.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Gun sales skyrocketed among formerly anti-gun liberals in June. That will be quite enough whinging and whining about scary right wing nutjobs and their scary guns.

And just so we're clear, after the whole Catholic teenager smirking at the belligerent "native American" activist, I've been lied to about nazis and the "right wing" my entire **** life. I still have the enormous distaste for "the right" that I've held my entire adulthood, I certainly don't think they're angels, but we're done complaining about "right wing." I'm not having that bullshit about white nationalists, white supremacists, or racist conservatives any more. If an antifa rioter gets shot, maybe that shithead shouldn't have been throwing molotovs.

If we want to make a big show about tearing down racist institutions, we can start by banning the Democratic Party.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Bought one myself, although it was actually a coincidence. I got a .30-30 lever action Henry Rifle. I always wanted something like that. Up till now, ever gun I've had has been one I inherited from my dad or had issued to me.



No one's an angel certainly.

That said, what an awful lot of the right has been asking for a long time is "leave us the **** alone", and although not necessarily in a libertarian way, what they really want is just to be allowed to ***** about people that they don't like in peace, not re-impose things from the past.

That's been turned into "they want to turn back the clock" by people who feel anyone who's not on their cultural bandwagon is someone to be crushed.

As for "racism", that has been nothing but name-calling for a long, LONG time now.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

IMO the D party is playing a dangerous game by thinking they can control the true-believers of CRT. The club they wield will turn on them and everyone that's a "sinner."

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There are laws in place that need to be enforced for that, and there are individuals that we as a society have empowered to enforce those laws the answer is not to arm the citizenry and have them step in. If the appropriate authorities are failing in their duties there are processes to recall sheriffs or mayors that refuse to replace the chief of police.



I haven't seen anyone around here trying to defend rioters and looters.


^ This

Followed by this v


When you foster a mortal fear of your fellow citizens you start drawing out the type who view themselves as modern-day heroes like Kenosha boy. The type of folk who believe in bringing a semi-automatic rifle to a rock fight, the Chicago-way right? In response to armed counter protesters we are seeing the protesters arming themselves which results in people like the guy in (Seattle or Portland?) that shot the guy from Patriot Prayer.

Back to your earlier analogy about lily pads, I think the underlying conditions in the pond are worsening. First there is the police turning a blind eye to riots, then there is a proliferation of arms on both sides of the issue and now we have seen the willingness of individuals on both sides willing to act with deadly consequence against the other side.

However, free speech (protesting) is a Constitutional Right and open carrying most forms of weapons is a Constitutional Right as well. It sure feels like putting those things together in some of these locales (based on their political and social environment) is tossing a lit-stick of dynamite into a gas-station and if enough of those places catch then the whole pond is gonna be choked quicker than we might have thought.

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That doesn't get the job done in the short term. Again, we are not talking about having the citizenry "step in" so much as bringing them in as additional manpower.



Me either. I wasn't talking about anyone here.


The problem here is that there was a rock fight in the first place. The presence of guns does not automatically make the gun-bearers at fault.

I am very deeply alarmed by this idea that when people with guns show up, fault for violence suddenly shifts to them just because guns. If they were part of a proper militia, at least they would be supervised, but none of this would have happened had the Wisconsin National Gaurd been dealing with the rioters, or if the rioters were not rioting.



Then we may just have to accept the lit stick of dynamite. Protesting may be a Constitutional right, but the obligation is clearly on those assembling (protesting) to be peaceful. Their lack of peacefulness is not an excuse to curb the right of others to be armed. Nor is violence the fault of those with guns just because guns. Guns are not magically different from other weapons.

As for the kid in Kenosha, he's a teenager. He may have exercised some poor judgement. That does not in any way excuse attacks on him nor make him unjustified in defending himself. I have seen no evidence whatsoever that he was doing anything other than protecting himself; at worst he committed a misdemeanor by having ht efirearm as a juvenile and we routinely excuse juvenile misdemeanors.

He shot people that needed shooting at the time. I've been in that situation but fortunately been spared the need to pull the trigger. He was not. He will carry that for the rest of his life. He will see the faces in his sleep. But he was well within his rights to shoot those people.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Viva Frei/Barnes youtube discussions about Kenosh Kid, don't sound good. Sounds like his lawyer is shady AF and not doing a good job.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Anyone who thinks citizens murdering people committing property crimes against a fourth-party is justified is probably more than a little bit of a monster. Under what circumstances did this kid need to drive three hundred miles with a rifle to protect someone else's gas station in someone else's city in someone else's state from entitled SJWs? No one needed to die, no one needed to be shot, Kyle had no reason to be there. Then when two people attempted to apprehend him he shot them too, if those people had been the police doing their job instead of a medic and a protestor then what?

Here you are advocating for Sheriffs forming up posses of armed able-bodied adults. Your cries of militia are a red-herring, a militia as you are trying to use the term are a group of trained individuals not an impromptu mob of gun-toting nuts willing to apply violence in place of the police force.

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There's video of him being attacked, and one of the attackers had a gun of his own.

The rest is irrelevant. If he had no business being there, neither did anyone else. It's a double standard.

As for the idea that all the able-bodied adults in a particular community suddenly become "gun-toting nuts" once they have guns, ro if they are called to help suppress insurrection when there is an emergency, that's ridiculous. You seem very hung up on the word "militia" as if anything labelled with this term suddenly becomes a raging mob, and I don't know why other than maybe the conditioning we've all had on the word.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

It's the conditioning we've all had on the word. We've trained people to go into hysterics over racism and guns. That's why I'm treating this like the little leftist who cried nazi.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I guess I've had the wrong type of conditioning then.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

He didn't drive 300 miles. It's like he drove from a suburb to there. He put himself in a bad situation, but he did rightly defend himself. IIRC he's not even part of a "militia."

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn