The Chutzpah of a Police Union in Santa Ana, California

They look like a bunch of kids pretending to play Call of Duty in real life. Wearing masks, guns drawn, breaking doors, and all of it is not even necessary. They could have sent one detective to go talk to them.

They do it because they can. However, if you start killing cockroaches with sledgehammers, you are likely to leave some dents in the floor (i.e. collateral damage).

I'm pretty sure the strategy hasn't changed. The change is that a broader segment of the public is now aware of it due to the new widespread technology to record and distribute video. It's similar to black American's experiences of policing, which has always been that way but now people who never would have seen it are (more) aware of it.

I think it's a coping strategy formed in response to an absurd mission. Going by national stats on drug use, I would guess that most cops have, at least at some point in their life, been friends with drug users and tolerated drug use, if not participated themselves. But they now find themselves in a situation where they are ordered to oppose it. The psyche hates hypocrisy, so it constructs an alternate narrative: the war on drugs isn't about drugs, it's about violent drug dealers and drug users. That's a cause worth fighting for, and one that would make sense to fight using military tactics.

In other words, kicking doors down makes cops feel like righteous warriors, writing tickets in pot shops makes them feel like asshole tattletales. They pick the strategy that makes it easiest to live with themselves. It has nothing to do with the optimal strategy to counteract the violation of law.

The problem is that the second the word "drugs" are mentioned the police think they are dealing with a colombian/mexican lord or drug Scarface by default. The "war" moniker needs to be dropped asap

They do it because the paramilitary force strategy is fun for them and they get away with it under the guise that they are in huge levels of danger. When the danger level really does ramp up you end up with a stand off where none of them would dare kick down a door for a raid.

That's an easy one, and you don't even need to be a cop to understand the answer: It's way more exciting and fun to kick in doors and rush inside a building with guns drawn.

Thugs.

It's used sarcastically. It takes balls to be this brazen in your tyranny.

Shameless perhaps would be a more suitable word for it?

It fits with the classic example: someone who murders their mother and father, then asks the judge to show mercy to an orphan.

That description referred to the Police Union that was defending them by calling the footage illegal, rather than the actual cops themselves.

Your guns and your union.

They took the equipment down so they knew it was there and recording them. Not getting all of them COULD mean that since they thought they got them all, that they were no longer being recorded and now safe. Safe meaning reasonably assured of privacy.

Don't think I'm agreeing with the behavior at all, just voicing a thought.

If you really want this to take off as a crowd-sourced compilation of the High Crimes and Misdemeanors of America, you need to switch to a wiki format. One long list with a single organization hierarchy won't scale in terms of structure, usability or amenability to collaboration. And before you embark on that, double check whether there isn't already such a wiki out there, and contribute to that.

One of the projects on my todo list is a site that allows a group of people, especially people who aren't great writers on their own, or don't have the time to be, to "make a case", to collaboratively and systematically build that case and hone its articulation.

If successful it would be a kind of Wikipedia/GitHub of arguments. So instead of everyone trying to re-explain or re-argue a point each time there is a need, they could link to the canonical explanation. So instead of off-the-cuff and incomplete, or un-expert and flawed arguments, a point of view's "best foot" is always put forward.

That's kind of what Chutzpah means. What does the word mean to you?

Chutzpah is exactly the right word.

"Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish defines chutzpah as "gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible 'guts', presumption plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to". In this sense, chutzpah expresses both strong disapproval and condemnation. In the same work, Rosten also defined the term as "that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan". Chutzpah amounts to a total denial of personal responsibility, that renders others speechless and incredulous ... one cannot quite believe that another person totally lacks common human traits like remorse, regret, guilt, sympathy and insight. The implication is at least some degree of psychopathy in the subject, as well as the awestruck amazement of the observer at the display."

- Wikipedia (because The Joys of Yiddish unfortunately isn't online) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chutzpah

Chutzpah referred to the union defending the behaviour not the behaviour itself.

You must not be from Wisconsin.

Walker believes every public servant... (Other than Police and Firemen)... should be prevented from unionizing.

I feel I should note that Walker exempted police unions from his union-busting.

And I disagree. The size and scope of the entity representing the employer and the size and scope of the entity representing the employee should be similar in scale. It's the only reasonable way to curtail abuses arising from imbalances in political power.

For government workers, there is effectively only one employer. It is entirely reasonable for those employees to band together into one union. Or three. Or ten. That tenth one might not be all that effective, but collective bargaining as a labor cartel should be equally accessible to everyone, regardless of who their employer may be.

If one union behaves badly, it should be perfectly acceptable for the employer to blacklist their members from future employment or contract renewals. In the case where the union is defending the indefensible--the open and notorious police misconduct seen in the video--the right thing to do would be to just stop employing their members.

In trying to save the jobs of a handful of bad cops, this union is damaging the collective reputation of all police in the entire country, along with the criminal justice system. The behavior in the video is reminiscent of Hollywood motion picture depictions of organized crime crews shaking down business owners for protection money.

Not all unions are bad, but this one sure is.

You oversimplify leftists in the same way some leftists oversimplify anti-union sentiment.

I don't think I have ever seen anyone express that sentiment except to ridicule it, as you have here. And at least in my section of the community, "leftism" is so common that it's assumed to be the default.

Unions are supposed to support their members, and legally defend them. If it wasn't the union making this crazy request, it would be the cops' lawyers.

And that's not a bad thing. Proper legal defense is an extremely important and fundamental right, even for the people we dislike. Adequate legal defense is often how people end up needing to protect themselves from crooked cops.

If this crazy request is honored, then something is broke.

A lot of people respond to videos of police malfeasance by blaming the victim who must have been a bad guy and somehow provoked it. Confirmation bias is a powerful thin.

Unions are also supposed to kick out members who bring them into disrepute.