Thomas Hawk talks about harassment of this sort on his blog but I’ve never read such a simple common sense way to relate to cops and help them.

What a great source of street intelligence if they’d just use it.

Bernie Kerik used to do something similar with merchants in Times Square when he was a beat cop. If someone bought a holster they’d put it in a red bag or something that he provided. When he saw them walk out with a red bag he’d ask “got a license for that gun” and nab a lot of people carrying pieces.

She would, if she lived on the street and wasn’t rich or famous… :)

BTW the rare but highly-publicised ‘kid-gloves’ treatment for muslims has always had the scent of deliberate high-profile exaggeration – ‘look what we are having to do’. Similarly though differently, ‘listen to these opinions that ‘PC’ prevents me from expressing’…

Oh, forget you. You said we shouldn’t “put up” with them.

You, and I emphasize this, did not say something like “we need to rethink/reorganize what powers we give to police and how we select individuals to be invested with this power” (which is my basic position). You said we should not “put up with” police.

Granted, I live in a community where not “putting up with” black people’s “encroachments” used to mean “we” should go lynch one of ‘em, so perhaps I understand “don’t put up with” = “eliminate” far too literally. Perhaps it’s also true that I recognized that error and intentionally deleted my first response, with a comment in brackets that explained what I had deleted and dismissed my own initial reaction as just “provocative” venting. I also used the words “put up with” anarchist thinking as a kind of test for what milder form of interpretation could be applied to those words.

So why include the comment anyway? To point out that your rhetoric wasn’t at all productive, I guess, and sounded vaguely anarchist. I’m OK with folks who say “police are scum,” out of human sympathy as well as common experience. I value people who advocate for workable alternatives to the current mess we have; I also value people who advocate for ideal theories of state power that make sense and fulfill a credible notion of social justice.

@47: I’m tempted to Godwin you, but I’ll refrain, partly because it’s unclear whether you are, in fact, only joking.

Japanese police torture suspects routinely and class any visibly non-suspicious death as suicide. Witness the recent Sumo murder as an example. Their relationship with the civil populace is hardly uncomplicated, despite the homogeneity of Japanese society.

Also, I have been a victim of 3 attempted attacks in London, and seen several more, in just one year, and I live in a very racially mixed area. In every case the offenders were white British. I have no time for the claim that racial heterogeneity is the cause of crime or has any relationship to the police force’s racism.