{"id":182899,"date":"2015-05-09T21:18:00","date_gmt":"2015-05-10T02:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/05\/09\/and-john-dillinger-feared-the-chilling-effect-of-the-fbi\/"},"modified":"2015-05-09T21:18:00","modified_gmt":"2015-05-10T02:18:00","slug":"and-john-dillinger-feared-the-chilling-effect-of-the-fbi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/05\/09\/and-john-dillinger-feared-the-chilling-effect-of-the-fbi\/","title":{"rendered":"And John Dillinger Feared the &#8220;Chilling Effect&#8221; of the FBI"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/i.imgur.com\/qZGoXPg.jpg\" rel=\"lytebox\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i.imgur.com\/qZGoXPg.jpg\" style=\"cursor: pointer; float: right; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px;\" width=\"300\" \/><\/a>Today&#8217;s front page of the <i>Baltimore Sun<\/i> interviews a number of current and former members of the Baltimore Police Department, noting ominously that,&nbsp; &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.baltimoresun.com\/news\/maryland\/crime\/blog\/bs-md-ci-police-prosecutors-morale-20150508-story.html\">The result could have a &#8220;chilling effect&#8221; on officers, preventing them from making &#8220;good faith judgments&#8221; when making arrests<\/a>&#8220;. <\/p>\n<p>If we eliminate the most significant issue in the whole Freddie Gray case, the fact that <b><span style=\"font-size: 100%; font-variant: small-caps;\">a 25 year old man was killed by the callous, brutal, and unprofessional behavior of members of the BPD<\/span><\/b>, we still have the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A bogus arrest (you cannot tell if a knife is legal or illegal from seeing the clip sticking out of his pocket).<\/li>\n<li>Deliberate brutality on the part of the police.<\/li>\n<li>The <a href=\"http:\/\/40yrs.blogspot.com\/2015\/05\/i-think-that-we-may-have-identified.html\">senior officer involved has had multiple incidents which were the juxtaposition of abuse of his position and serious mental illness<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>The police department leaking false reports to the public of the incident.<\/li>\n<li>There is a pattern of abuse in the department, as evidence by the <a href=\"http:\/\/40yrs.blogspot.com\/2015\/04\/the-technical-term-is-lying-sack-of-sh.html\">steady stream of settlements of police misconduct lawsuits<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I think that it&#8217;s well past time for police to follow the laws that they are sworn to uphold.<\/p>\n<p>I am well aware that the job of being a policeman is a tough one, and I know that it involves tough calls, and I know that human beings make mistakes.<\/p>\n<p>This goes well beyond mistakes. <\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s not the problem.&nbsp; The problem is the fact that there is a culture of impunity that is nearly universal among law enforcement officers in the United States, and this ill serves both the citizenry and the constabulary.<\/p>\n<p>The Baltimore PD <a href=\"http:\/\/40yrs.blogspot.com\/2015\/04\/the-technical-term-is-lying-sack-of-sh.html\">is generating over a million dollars in brutality and misconduct settlements every year<\/a>, and the very small minority of officers who are responsible for this suffer no consequences.<\/p>\n<p>BTW, I think that one of the things that would help here is if cops got a mandatory 6 paid months off every 3 years, and officers were required to attend mandatory counseling on at least a monthly basis.<\/p>\n<p>I have a friend in the psychological biz, and his assessment is that most police officers who have been on the job for more than a few years suffer from PTSD.<\/p>\n<p>This does not make for a well functioning civil society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today&#8217;s front page of the Baltimore Sun interviews a number of current and former members of the Baltimore Police Department, noting ominously that,&nbsp; &#8220;The result could have a &#8220;chilling effect&#8221; on officers, preventing them from making &#8220;good faith judgments&#8221; when making arrests&#8220;. If we eliminate the most significant issue in the whole Freddie Gray case, &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[974,1041,1104,982,979],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hack-journalism","category-law-enforcement-misconduct","category-psychology","category-stupid","category-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182899"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182899\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}