Crime Police refusing to do their jobs thread

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We saw what happened in Uvalde, Texas. Here's a place to add more instances where police refused to help someone in need.

To start with, police in Arizona refused to save a drowning man.

Man drowns as Arizona police watch: ‘I’m not jumping in after you’​

Julian Mark


Sean Bickings pleaded for help as he struggled to stay afloat in a reservoir in Tempe, Ariz., late last month. But Tempe police officers watched without intervening as Bickings went underwater and did not come back up, according to city officials and a transcript of body-camera footage.
“I’m going to drown. I’m going to drown,” said Bickings, 34, according to a transcript of video from the May 28 incident released by city officials.

“Okay, I’m not jumping in after you,” an officer, identified as Officer 1 in the transcript, said moments later, after directing Bickings to grab onto a bridge.

“Please help me,” Bickings said. “Please, please, please.”
Soon after, Bickings drowned, according to a Friday news release by city officials.

Now, three Tempe police officers have been put on “non-disciplinary paid administrative leave” as the Arizona Department of Public Safety and the Scottsdale Police Department investigate the officers’ response at the city of Tempe’s request, city officials said. The city has not released the names of the officers.

In a statement, Police Chief Jeff Glover and City Manager Andrew Ching called Bickings’s death a “tragedy.” Glover met with Bickings’s mother last week, according to officials.

The Tempe Officers Association, the city’s police union, did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Sunday.
Just after 5 a.m. on May 28, Tempe police officers responded to an apparent disturbance between Bickings and a woman at the Tempe Center for the Arts, which sits on a promenade along the Tempe Town Lake, a reservoir in the city. In its statement, the city referred to Bickings as “unsheltered.”

Body-camera footage released by the city shows officers approach and speak to a woman who identified herself as Bickings’s wife. As she picked up her belongings off the ground, she explained that she and Bickings sometimes have disagreements but said that he did not physically harm her.

Two of the officers then walked over to Bickings, who was seated on a bench facing the water, according to the body-camera footage. By this point, the officers were running the couple’s names for outstanding warrants, a standard procedure, according to the city. The police later said Bickings had three outstanding warrants, the Arizona Republic reported.

But those did not come up during Bickings’s encounter with police, according to the body-camera footage, which shows the officers trying to make small talk with Bickings as they ran the check.

That’s when Bickings slowly climbed over a short fence dividing the boardwalk and the water. When one of the officers asked what Bickings was doing, Bickings replied that he was going “for a swim.”
“I’m free to go, right?” Bickings asked.

The officers said he was not allowed to swim in the lake, but Bickings waded in and started swimming a freestyle stroke toward a bridge, according to the body-camera footage.

“How far do you think he’s going to be able to swim?” one of the officers asked, according to the footage.

Two of the officers then walked onto the bridge Bickings had swum under and watched him, according to the body-camera footage, which at that point ends “due to the sensitive nature of the remaining portion of the recording,” officials wrote at the end of the video.

Instead, the city provided a transcript of the remaining portion, which indicates that Bickings became increasingly distressed as he remained in the water. Bickings told the officers he was going to “drown,” according to the transcript.

“No, you’re not,” an officer, identified as Officer 2, replied.

Officer 1 then directed Bickings to “go to the pylon and hold on.”

“I’m drowning,” Bickings said.

“Come back over to the pylon,” Officer 2 said.

“I can’t,” Bickings said. “I can’t.”

“Okay, I’m not jumping in after you,” Officer 1 said.

Bickings then begged for help and said moments later, “I can’t touch. Oh God. Please help me. Help me.”

Bickings’s partner then joined the officers and begged them to help Bickings, according to the transcript. The officers told her to persuade Bickings to swim toward the bridge pylon. She tried and became increasingly upset. At one point, according to the transcript, Bickings’s partner tried to jump over the railing to help Bickings but did not end up doing so.

“I’m just distraught because he’s drowning right in front of you and you won’t help,” Bickings’s partner said.

The officers continued to tell her to calm down, saying a third officer was getting a boat.

“No, no, no. Swim,” the woman replied, using an expletive.

“You’re not helping,” Officer 2 said.

Moments later, Officer 1 said that Bickings “went underneath and hasn’t come up since about 30 seconds ago.”

For the remainder of the transcript, the officers did not address Bickings. Bickings’s partner continued to tell the officers that she loved Bickings.
“He’s everything I got,” she said. “I can’t lose him, he’s going to die.”

Officials said Bickings swam no more than 40 yards before he became distressed and “soon went under and did not resurface.”

The Arizona Republic reported that a team with Tempe Fire Medical Rescue pulled Bickings’s body out of the water just before 11:30 a.m.


archive.ph

Man drowns as Arizona police watch: ‘I’m not jumping in after you’

archived 6 Jun 2022 14:19:35 UTC
archive.ph archive.ph




 

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I'm just more upset the article identified the woman as his wife, but then later on kept referring to her as "Bickings' partner". Jesus Christ, MSN.
 
Caesare said:
After seeing the pictures of him, I don't even think it's a shame he died. He's a butt ugly, bald black manlet with a record. He jumped in the water and drowned like a retard, and I'm supposed to be mad that others didn't put themselves at risk for his ugly ass? He's not a child. If it was a child, they'd have jumped in after him. He's just an ugly POS though, so it was better to just let him drown.
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I need a slightly higher standard before it's not a shame. If more comes out and it turns out he was another child molester who got what he deserved all well and good. If he's just some jackass with a record then it's still a death that was avoidable if he had not been a moron. I've pity for the dumbass teenagers who jump into quarries and drown, I've got the same for him.

But I agree with you. This is very much the consequences of his own actions.
 
Sorry, long post, but this is a topic that deeply interests me, because the public image of law enforcement is so strange. I think if two people went out, one person filming instances of cops looking good and one filming instances of cops fucking up, you'd get no change in opinion, which I think is unique to police - from everywhere in America except the most suburban areas, cops seemed loathed and mistrusted, and its not even informed by bad experiences most of the time - its the ideology of whether you even agree with the concept of law enforcement. Like it's always hostile and alien and unwanted. Dumb policy though it turned out to be, 'Defund the Police' should really have been interpreted by smart politicians as a request for actual representative civilians with the power to enforce the law, not a callous force of annoyed thugs who are barely paid enough to see the protesters as human. And unfortunately President Trump did not help the police's image by needlessly adding the stupid 'secret disappearances' clown car performance.

Maybe somebody disagrees or can correct me, but the United States is the only first world country I've seen where police almost are essentially an autonomous paramilitary force, where they have no trust of the public and the public as no trust of them. There are good cops and bad cops, but what seems unique about American cops is that a tired cynicism seems to be the only agenda, a boys club of sorts to racketeer money of nobodies they arrest and try and stay comfy. For this end, they demand all other aspects of law enforcement give them a broad pass for routine acts of brutality, because they've clearly come to view it (or like to) as inevitable in their jobs, and they probably don't consider half the people they deal with to be human. And they close ranks whenever one of them is threatened unless they have no choice, because its a fraternity of power and relatively easy living and they don't appreciate media and the rest butting in and leaving with hype about their little side business.

Then again, the United States is a sprawling, uneven country of stubborn, proud, unpredictable people, some of whom are black, some of whom do crime and a lot of who have guns. And the cruel truths about racial predilection to violence, crime and the people that they have to deal with all day don't stand up next a clip of a bunch of cops ganging up on a defenseless individual - a clip that I guess only time spent dealing with those people regularly would be able to justify. They aren't trained in anything complicated, they just follow procedure, sometimes with a bit of inspiration and compassion, sometimes to impossibly stupid degrees, both of which get reported as feel good stories or national headlines. I also get the feeling there are a lot of cops who simply cannot state what they may feel is the truth because the reality of what they see on duty is not politically correct (I'm guessing no cop believes 'mental illness is a social construct'). And when they (finally) got the message that what actions they do could have political consequences, if the alternative was to do nothing and let a few more people who are being convinced to not trust you die, vs. risk your neck, make a mistake and never live it down, I can understand, in a job where you likely learn life is cheap and the people you defend are not worth it, that is the better calculation to make. It's the way I think Derek Chauvin must have been thinking - in public, on camera, people yelling, but still his overriding instinct was to clamp with all his strength this petty black criminal that had failed to show him respect, a parasite on society that wouldn't be missed and didn't matter. After compartmentalising that feeling for nearly 20 years, I wouldn't be surprised if he assumed everyone thought the same way. But that's fucked up, so he had to go. How does a cop pick up her handgun instead of her taser without realising? This cop who had serve for 26 years could have gotten confused, panicked, gotten careless, so stupid as to defy human understanding of intelligence - or she reached for her handgun because that was her instinctual, practiced response when dealing with suspicious black men in cars, because 26 years had taught her that was the appropriate thing to do.

So to even have this emerging narrative where cops are 'refusing to do their job' like its a new thing is already tainted, because pro-cop people will think its another anti-police, mob-rule narrative, where as cop-skepticals with think it exactly typical of a callous, racist profiteering mercenary police force. The reasons for cops being unable to even try and do something are as myriad as why they fuck up doing them at all, so the temptation is to default toward incompetence or malice, which ironically feeds two narratives - that #notallcops, and #blacklivesmatter

I find this interesting to compare to how the Hong Kong police handled the riots - much better trained, much better led, much better co-ordinated against huge mobs of angry people throwing shit at them. But it was the cops that took all the heat - they took more casualties, some got isolated and beaten up, one got stabbed, but they never deployed lethal weapons or outright brutality. Their goal was to arrest people as gently as possible and push the crowd back,. But some of the people who most strongly resisted arrest were university students, who were hysterical because they idolised America and liberal talking points - and so they we convinced that the cops where going to murder them. They stuck them in a van, charged a few, and sent the rest out. And yes, the Hong Kong police are made up of Hong Kong people, but at that time, putting on the uniform meant you had sided with evil. And for the three people that died (one of who fell off a building, sad fuck) there were endless accusations of conspiracy or excessive violence. By American standards it was a pillow fight.

I used to think bad American cops were just disproportionately reported, if only because I found it disturbing to believe that so many were openly racist or incompetent or callous, but I guess the more redpilled answer is that the widespread black profiling, brutality and the borderline contempt of the people they're supposed to protect is actually both necessary and inadmissible. It's easy for people to create insidious narratives for all kinds of law enforcement, but in America it's uniquely bad because it's obvious that it is divorced from the function of compassionate civilian police force. So I guess while it's very easy to create a compelling narrative about vengeful, entitled, jilted police not doing their jobs, the likely truth is that its a bunch of badly trained, underpaid, punch-clock every men and women who do what they can to the best of their motivation, and because its America, the standard they're expected to follow is hyped to fuck. It's the worst problem in America that every issue - the police, guns, racism, free-speech, abortion, immigration, LGBWTF, the rest - all have very compelling and clean narratives to be on one side, and the people in the middle just get caricatured and forgotten.
 
NeoGAF Lurker said:
That’s okay if this wasn’t a perfect example, this thread will fill up quickly. Lots of anarchotyranny going on these days.
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Only if we change the title to, "Police letting people sleep in the bed they made...forever."
 
round robin said:
Police in this country are in a very precarious position. Pretty much anything they do outside of honest-to-god heroics can and will be used to vilify them, no matter how justified or unjustified their actions may be. No real winning move except not being a cop.
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Not really. Like only if you care about the feefees of dipshits on Twitter. In practice, police are massively protected by absurd agreements made between powerful police unions and rich elites.
Look into Maryland's LEOBR. Maryland's is one of the worst, but plenty of states have similar laws.

When the police fuck up (and they do often), they might have to endure some mean words on social media, but they're rarely at risk of any serious consequences. Neither financial (the taxpayer pays out for lawsuits) nor criminal.

And on top of that, they won't even run into mass shooting situations? Fuck that, we should pass laws to criminalize police cowardice.
 
Police do not feel appreciated by their communities, so of course they aren't going to give it their all. I honestly wonder if all the BLM/defund hadn't happened, if the lack of that butterfly effect would have had some impact on how the Uvalde police responded to that situation. I feel like police forces around the USA have all been putting in the minimum for the last three years now because every time they turn around they are at risk for losing their jobs just for trying to DO their jobs.

As for the drowning, dude swam into the lake to escape police when they told him not to. He swam far away from the shore. Why would a police officer risk his life to jump in after you, that's not what they are trained to do. That exceeds the call of their duty. If it were a child who fell in or something like that, I'd feel very differently as I doubt anyone who is an able-bodied swimmer would not act differently there.
 
Marvin said:
Not really. Like only if you care about the feefees of dipshits on Twitter. In practice, police are massively protected by absurd agreements made between powerful police unions and rich elites.
Look into Maryland's LEOBR. Maryland's is one of the worst, but plenty of states have similar laws.

When the police fuck up (and they do often), they might have to endure some mean words on social media, but they're rarely at risk of any serious consequences. Neither financial (the taxpayer pays out for lawsuits) nor criminal.

And on top of that, they won't even run into mass shooting situations? Fuck that, we should pass laws to criminalize police cowardice.
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Silly me, guess I just imagined the summer of 2020. Police outrage is way past the point of a few dipshits on Twitter and there are several municipalities that have passed sweeping police reforms, effectively crippling their ability to prevent or respond to crime in any meaningful way. Combine that with the general negative attitude towards police in this country and it's no wonder they don't give a shit about doing their jobs anymore, because they know they'll be vilified either way so they may as well at least be alive.

You're right that some departments have powerful unions that allow them to get away with whatever they want but that is a separate issue entirely.
 
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