Code of Silence
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
I'm pretty sure that without police 'managing' these mid level street gangs, they would just exist as smaller decentralized crews that would be much less violent as we would stop creating Tony Montanas and instead just have disorganized criminal activity on a smaller income scale since honest police would be able to easily disrupt these networks into bankruptcy. Instead we get police helping to form supergangs, with multi millions to spend on weapons and corrupt all aspects of a city with criminals getting into mafia-like construction industries to influence city tenders, bribe city employees or unchecked extortion of local business. Either legalize it all or end the strategy of selective enforcement, which means we likely need to double police budgets as cost is a major factor in this strategy of enforcement that relies on criminal cooperation.
Because they cannot defeat it. You will never win a war on vice. We didn't learn our lesson when prohibition was enacted. When you target vice and addiction a violent black market is created.
>they would just exist as smaller decentralized crews that would be much less violent
Being sure is pretty different from knowing. It's just as likely the street gangs would congregate power because there is a whole lot of money in illegal drug sales anyway you look at it. This is no different than non drug gangs, and even businesses themselves.
Decriminalization of most drugs, and clinics where drugs are given in free, metered doses is probably the best way to remove massive amounts of money from the drug black markets.
If you're interested, read Daniel Okrent _Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition_
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Call-Rise-Fall-Prohibition/dp/07...
Good thing the American public learned our lesson and never did anything stupid like that again.
That would come as news to Singapore:
https://www.mfa.gov.sg/content/mfa/media_centre/press_room/p...
How do the facts back this up?
It helps when your country is smaller than most international cities.
http://www.travelersdigest.com/7390-how-big-is-singapore-in-...
> Death penalty for traffickers, in our experience, has been an effective deterrent, as part of a framework of laws, coupled with effective enforcement based on rule of law. Drug traffickers stay out of Singapore now, largely, because of the knowledge: first, that there is a highly professional and incorruptible police force and there is a high probability that they will get caught; and second, there is rule of law, an independent judiciary and a high probability that, based on the laws, they will face the death penalty. So we do not have slums, ghettoes, no-go zones for the police, or syringes in our playgrounds.
I don't think you can have the latter without the former.
Both Singapore and Japan have low rates of crime in general, especially drug crime and gun crime -- two kinds of crimes that depend on criminals having access to items that are highly regulated or completely banned.
I think the conclusion to draw from this is that islands are able to control their borders pretty well, and they can prevent a lot of contraband from coming in. That alone is sufficient to explain the low rate of drug crime in Japan, where drug trafficking is not a capital crime. It's probably also sufficient for Singapore, which means that the death penalty explanation is probably overdetermined.
They are not nice people, but as criminal organizations go, having one that views itself as the protector of the people isn't so bad.
After the massive earthquake a few years ago, the Yakuza were among the first to offer aid and assistance to the region -- ahead of the national government, even.
And, if you are going to engage in criminal enterprise in Japan, you need their blessing. If you attempt to sell drugs here without their permission, you will quickly find yourself suffering from an acute case of death.
Even if there were a single organization controlling all drug trafficking, that would not explain why drug crime, and drug use, are so low in Japan.
Maybe, (depending on your definition of "war"), but we can culturally transcend vice.
Alcohol: nope.
Marijuana: nope.
Cocaine: nope.
Obviously the list goes on and on. If by "transcend" you really mean "ignore" or perhaps "aid those in trouble, leave the others alone" then, okay. But to eliminate the demand: I think the evidence, over many decades, many cultures, and despite billions (possibly trillions) of dollars of direct and indirect cost, the evidence speaks for itself.
Or because they don't want to defeat it?
The war on drugs is a big source of income for the police.
Maybe, maybe not. The problem is that those businesses are still illegal and so have no recourse to the law for dispute settlement. When fraud, theft, delinquent payments, etc cannot be addressed with the force of the law they can only be addressed with the force of, well, force. Which likely escalates recursively until the biggest bad ass is holding all the marbles, taking us back to where we started out. It's that lack of recourse to legit dispute settlement that fundamentally guarantees that illegal markets for high demand, high value goods will attract and/or create violent actors, IMO.
Mandate body-cams for every single cop nationwide. Have all misconducts investigated by a completely separate department. Convict a few cops for perjury if they lie on the stand to help their peers. These three steps should go a long way towards mitigating gross misconduct.
That's not a statement of support. Personally, I reject all military-esque ideas within a police force and consider them terribly dangerous.
I don't think that's right, which is why we don't have police courts with a separate system of law and judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys that are also police officers, the way the military is.
Instead, the theory is the opposite, overlooking the inherent conflict of interest and just holding that police are just like everyone else, so that, just as it would be the police department that handled the investigation, arrest, etc. if any random person was accused of a crime, so to, if a police officer is accused of a crime, its the police department that performs those functions.
To have someone else do that when police are the subject of the accusation would be an acknowledgement that there is a difference between the police and everyone else when it comes to criminal investigations.
This goes even further, in a somewhat bizarre direction. Suffice it to say "fraternal order of police" may be a more accurate descriptor than "protect and serve" in these cases (and, I imagine, much more generally).
Similar idea-> I think the only reason Ed. Snowden was able to get away / stay out of US prison was he had worked so long with CIA/NSA etc that he was very familiar with the tactics they would use to go after him, and he was able to take appropriate action to evade them.
If anyone is interested in doing similar work, it's surprisingly easy to get into by using FOIA. Just submit a request for something that interests you and pursue it when (not if) you get resistance. My contribution to the ongoing lack of police oversight was a request for police complaints that was never responded to. Since I received no response and Illinois FOIA has actions based on unresponsiveness, my lawyer - who I think the invisible Institute shares - had something extra to build a case for the release of police complaints. It didn't lead to anything being released, but it was still helpful. Every bit counts!
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/r...
How much more evidence do we need that a lot of these malfunctioning police departments need to be liquidated and the perpetrators put into prison? Federal law enforcement exist specifically for times like these when the local law enforcement agencies have been co-opted by criminals and cronyism...
Naked Lunch, William Burroughs.
Time was, theoretically, you could at least mobilize to throw the bastards out (see the Battle of Athens) within reason and let the community heal itself.
Nowadays, though, the militarization of police and the desire of the .gov to crackdown on that sort of thing helps create this sorts of festering pockets of corruption that cannot be replaced because to do so is highly illegal.
(On a related note, this is part of the reason a great many people are reluctant to disarm or to accept legislation that would put them further at the mercy of police.)
Page not found We couldn’t find anything at this address. Please check the URL or go to the homepage.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=640923
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=639541
- 'Read More' button, why? The only action I should be taking is scrolling.
- No text resize / fluidity adjustment (yay whitespace!)
- Huge graphics, not even talking about the full screen stuff.
- Parallax crap
- Movie background image
- 50 requests / 13.9mb transferred / 8.28s load time
I just want to read the article, man.
One thing I will agree with you on, though: The "read more" link adds no perceptible value and seems to have become an editorial design cargo cult.
That's not strictly correct. Adblockers disable third-party services for it, you can just implement it yourself just like read-more, which again as I mentioned doesn't tell you whether they actually read or not.
Or from the other perspective, rather than simply presenting the facts and letting the reader judge the story's import, the "digital magazine experience" and "rich graphics and video" manipulate the reader's emotional state and seed his response. In other words, not journalism, but activism.
"But this is The Intercept," you might say, "the guys who exposed the NSA's malfeasance!"--or in other words, the ends justify the means. And we all know where that leads, even if some of us won't admit it.