#police tactics

[kropotkindersurprise]

June 20, 2024 - A protester takes on the role of mobile eyewash station to deal with police tear gas during a demonstration against proposed tax reforms in Nairobi, Kenya. [video]

[ahaura]

something something when the facade of western "democracy" continues to crumble, liberals are faced with the choice of either abandoning the systems that facilitate genocide, theft, exploitation, racism, etc. or resort to old habits that do nothing to seriously challenge or dismantle said systems... inevitably many will fall back on focusing on optics/aesthetics and hyper-individualizing their approach to combat their feelings of helplessness etc. and/or to avoid confronting the systems in place that have led to this moment (which they are most comfortable in, because liberalism never truly changes the systems in place)

the problem is not, never has been, and never will be the *tone* or *conduct* of palestinians (in occupied palestine or the diaspora); the obstacles in the way of peace&liberation are not from palestinians or palestinian resistance but the continuation of colonialism, the maintenance of which is inherently violent and oppressive. the people responsible for the genocide going into its 4th month are not palestinians who liberals want to tone police but the u.s. empire and its glorified military base settler colony, whose existence is founded + depends upon the genocide and ethnic cleansing of palestinians.

[alwaysbewoke]

[iamnotyourbabe]

Piggybacking on a recent post I reblogged, one thing I don't think most people in the USA realize is that cops are strategically brainwashed and given PTSD as a part of their training. The point of police training is to make every single officer believe "anyone can kill you at any time." This is not to excuse them or defend them in any way, but simply to explain why they act the way that they do.

Police departments use the same tactics that cults do to indoctrinate new hires, including isolation, us vs them mentality, and (this is hard to find online sources for because law enforcement has their own walled garden internet spaces to talk about internal stuff so it doesn't leak easily, but I've read and heard accounts from multiple police officers describing it) showing trainees psychologically distressing videos in an attempt to further break them down mentally.

Fear tactics are heavy stuff. They essentially create a fast-track pathway for thoughts to take through your amygdalae, which are the most accessible parts of the limbic system (the 'lizard brain' part of our brain - this phrasing is a gross oversimplification, but serves perfectly well in this example) and regulate emotional (knee-jerk) responses like fear, anxiety, and aggression. Emotional reactions are also addictive, they give you a burst of adrenaline and other brain chemicals to help you fight off whatever lion is supposedly attacking you (your brain doesn't know whether you're panicking over a predator stalking you or you forgetting to pick up a birthday present for your mom day-of) and unsurprisingly, this has a feedback effect.

The amygdalae are heavily involved in PTSD - they regulate fear response, threat assessment, avoidance, and episodic memory which consists of the sensory and emotional responses to past events. I don't want the most heavily-armed people in any area to also be the highest-strung. That sounds like -and is- a recipe for a bad time and bad interactions with the public.

I see a lot of internet leftists crafting conspiracy-style theories about why this is such an overarching problem throughout police departments but the truth is that it's simply convenient for authoritarian groups like them to traumatize people under their service. They see trauma-bonding as an extremely effective method of control and they don't care about the well-being of their peons beyond them being able to perform their job duties: win-win!

It's very easy to get conspiratorial about authority figures but it's important to remember that they are just as dumb, unorganized, and human as us.

Still.

Fuck cops.

[muffinlevelchicanery]

@frontlinemedics on insta

[aurorangen]

That morning's conversation replayed in Vincent's head. All 3 people sitting in front of him work at the police station, the very same station that led the disappearance case 20 years ago. Even though he felt guilty concealing information, he'll wait a bit longer and forget about it for the time being. But he kept on wondering - why was Isaac so tentative about detectives anyway?

[moeblob]

I am really tired of a situation rn.

[tentacion3099]

Easy

[badwasabi]

Tactical Breach Witch (Tactical Breach Wizards fanart)

By the pricking of my thumbs, Something 5-0 this way comes.

Inspired, of course, by Tom Francis' "Tactical Breach Wizards". I see a lot of flaws in this - the creative's curse - but I wanted to get it out the door for the game's launch.

After I worked on it for at least a year and a half.

(Krita says 14 hours or so, but it's lying.)

"Hey, Jon, why isn't she leading with her long wand?"

In universe, because it's still controlling the suspect's weapon. Out-of-universe; because I would have to make the picture wider.

"And why doesn't she have a mouth?"

Because the TBW characters don't have mouths. Totally not because I wanted to save a lot of tricky work, or because I was running out of time.

Obviously not.

"And why does she have two different boots?"

Station prank, just before they got The Call.

References:

"Crow" by Gardenbeth on flickr (Creative commons).

Triquerta ring by KRAMIKE on Etsy.

POTG pose of Echo from Overwatch.

This artwork is Creative Commons BY-NC-SA. Feel free to repost, with credit. Ideally, a link.

[whumpetywhump]

Whumptober Day 19 (Alt) - Body Modification

Double Mints (2017)

Fall In Love With Him - Ep. 3

One Ordinary Day - Ep. 5

PTU: Police Tactical Unit - Ep. 19

Wok Of Love - Ep. 5

[tacticalphotography]

[lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers]

BTW, this is one of the reasons people mask up at protests.

The cops are gathering data on who you are, and they are preparing to intimidate you.

[wolvennhunde]

All bite no bark.

[usarmytrooper]

Hot cop.

[beeseverywhen]

"All political parties face a trade-off under a first-past-the-post electoral system. Governing depends on attracting a broad coalition of voters, inevitably involving compromises that leave a party’s base disgruntled.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that as we move closer to a general election, the discontent from the anti-Labour left who claim there is little to distinguish Keir Starmer from Rishi Sunak in the battle for the premiership is only getting noisier."

"The argument is threefold: there’s no meaningful difference between the Conservatives and Labour; Starmer supposedly can’t be trusted because he has dropped pledges he made in the 2020 leadership election to shift his party towards the centre; finally, the “Tories are toast” and Labour can’t lose, so disgruntled left voters can safely vote for other parties, such as the Greens.

With Labour so far ahead in the polls, the urge to debunk these sentiments may seem like an expression of paranoia. But all three aspects of this narrative are comprehensively wrong, including the reassurance that it is safe for anyone who would prefer a Labour government to vote for another party in Labour-Tory contests."

"But what this underplays is the number of Labour-Tory marginals where a relatively small vote for other left candidates could cost Labour a win. James Kanagasooriam, of the polling company Focaldata, has written about the “sandcastle” nature of Labour’s likely majority; his forecast is that there will be many more marginal seats in the 2024 parliament compared with 2019. If more than predicted numbers of those who voted Green in the locals decide they can afford to do so in the general election because Labour is so far ahead in national polls, that will boost the Conservatives.

Next up is the idea that Starmer’s dropping of some of his leadership pledges makes him dangerously untrustworthy. But this is the product of a system in which the tiny unrepresentative slice of the electorate that is a party membership pick their leader before voters choose their prime minister. Anyone hoping to be PM would have to shift position between a leadership selection and a general election: a Labour leader’s most important job is to connect with potential voters, not to coddle members with the comfort blanket of a policy platform such as the “free broadband for all” 2019 pledge that was roundly rejected.

Liz Truss provides a cautionary tale of what happens when a party leader seeks to impose a membership-endorsed platform on the country without a general election. For Starmer to have stuck to his 2020 leadership election pledges, instead of spending the past four years understanding voters, would have been fundamentally anti-democratic.

The most egregious aspect of the anti-Labour left argument is there isn’t much to choose between Starmer and Sunak. Yes, Labour’s “Ming vase” election strategy has seen it take a much more cautious fiscal approach than many of us would like: it has effectively adopted the Tory macroeconomic worldview and with it a set of spending constraints that no one sensible thinks either party could stick to in the wake of the election.

That is frustrating for anyone hoping this election campaign may illuminate some of the tough trade-offs facing Britain; but it would have been incredibly risky for one side to go it alone on this. The alternative is Labour walking into the trap and handing the Conservatives a “Labour tax bombshell” election campaign.

From a commitment to scrap the Rwanda plan to making clear that in an ideal world Labour would discard the two-child benefit cap, there are plenty of reasons that it is preposterous to think that a Starmer government would make the same trade-offs as successive Conservative governments that have financed billions of pounds worth of tax cuts for more affluent families by cutting tax credits and benefits for low-income parents. The six pledges Starmer launched two weeks ago may be incremental, but Labour needs voters to believe they are deliverable, and they are indicative of a very different set of priorities than those that animate Sunak."

"Starmer is not without weaknesses, as shown by the days he took to clarify an interview last October in which he gave the impression he thought Israel had the right to withhold power and food from Gaza. But there is no doubt whatsoever he would make a vastly more compassionate and competent prime minister than Sunak. To encourage people to put that outcome at risk by casting a protest vote against a Labour government that does not yet exist is perhaps the ultimate form of luxury belief campaigning."