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Cops 4: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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Re: Cops 4: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

You're not wrong Maize, I obviously agree.

The problem is without video the defense can create some doubt (not what I would consider reasonable) as to whether he reached too quickly, understood/was complying with orders due to being high (and as someone who's smoked plenty of times that's ridiculous, if anything you'd be overly cautious and paranoid), and I'm guessing there were other things as well. The problem is the prosecution usually gets past this hurdle pretty easily when it's anyone other than a cop or a black victim is involved (Trayvon). So yeah, plenty of blame to the jury for sure but the prosecutor must've done a **** job if it was 10-2 in favor of acquittal.

And yeah ND is right, I wouldn't doubt for a second the judges treat these differently too in terms of how they frame the burden of proof and whatnot.
 
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Re: Cops 4: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Handyman said:
That is kind of what you are saying.

And the system followed the rules...saying it didnt "work".

Just because the verdict was right based on the system doesnt mean the system is right or it worked. You are ignoring all nuance and context in order to prove a point.
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Until this recent case, everyone wanted a trial. Not a special investigation, not an independent whatever. They wanted a trial. Well, they got a trial. Transparent. It was up to the peers. And not guilty.

Again, I do not think the verdict was correct from what I have seen/read, but I have not had access to the whole court transcripts. Yet people are saying the system didn't work, it didn't deliver "justice." Yes, it delivered justice. It does NOT diminish the tragedy that happened whatsoever. It does NOT say Yanez was innocent. It says he was not guilty.
 
Re: Cops 4: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

When different standards are clearly being applied by juries, prosecutors, and judges in these particular cases involving cops shooting black people then there's plenty reason to believe the system is broken.
 
Re: Cops 4: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Brenthoven said:
Until this recent case, everyone wanted a trial. Not a special investigation, not an independent whatever. They wanted a trial. Well, they got a trial. Transparent. It was up to the peers. And not guilty.
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What we want Brent, is a FAIR trial. My experience tells me this is most definitely NOT happening. If it was, these cops would be getting convicted left and right. Prosecutors simply don't lose very often when they go to trial. That is a provable, verifiable fact. Look at the numbers. If your prosecuting attorneys or district attorneys, or whatever they are called in your jurisdiction, are losing more than they are winning, elect a new D.A and have him or her hire better trial lawyers. But time and time again, when it is a cop charged with a crime, the prosecutors lose. Why? They are throwing the game. They don't cover all their bases. They don't bring forward as many witnesses. They don't fight tooth and nail when pieces of evidence are thrown out by judges. THEY DON'T TRY AS HARD TO WIN! TAKE THAT TO THE BANK!

This is all just like the stuff we talked about surrounding the elections. Its ugly. People don't want to believe that there are ugly, awful things about our society and this is just another one of those things. I know as sure as I know what state I am in right now that if I emptied my clip and put 16 bullets into the back of an unarmed man running away from me I would likely be spending most of the rest of my life in prison, at best. There is very little chance I could prove justification. Unless I am a cop. Then, my chances of spending a day in prison are almost nil.
 
Re: Cops 4: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

WeAreNDHockey said:
What we want Brent, is a FAIR trial. My experience tells me this is most definitely NOT happening. If it was, these cops would be getting convicted left and right. Prosecutors simply don't lose very often when they go to trial. That is a provable, verifiable fact. Look at the numbers. If your prosecuting attorneys or district attorneys, or whatever they are called in your jurisdiction, are losing more than they are winning, elect a new D.A and have him or her hire better trial lawyers. But time and time again, when it is a cop charged with a crime, the prosecutors lose. Why? They are throwing the game. They don't cover all their bases. They don't bring forward as many witnesses. They don't fight tooth and nail when pieces of evidence are thrown out by judges. THEY DON'T TRY AS HARD TO WIN! TAKE THAT TO THE BANK!

This is all just like the stuff we talked about surrounding the elections. Its ugly. People don't want to believe that there are ugly, awful things about our society and this is just another one of those things. I know as sure as I know what state I am in right now that if I emptied my clip and put 16 bullets into the back of an unarmed man running away from me I would likely be spending most of the rest of my life in prison, at best. There is very little chance I could prove justification. Unless I am a cop. Then, my chances of spending a day in prison are almost nil.
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You are way overstating this at best. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2007, only 3% of all state felony cases went to trial. Because so many cases are pled, the conviction rate overall is quite high for any given prosecutor. But depending on the jurisdiction there is quite a wide array of results for prosecutors who actually go to a jury trial. Last year in Florida for example, only 59% of all state jury trials resulted in any conviction on any charge. That's an overall winning percentage, but it is very, very far from "they don't lose very often when they go to trial." Prosecutors do, in fact, lose quite often in front of juries.
 
Re: Cops 4: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Wisko McBadgerton said:
You are way overstating this at best. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2007, only 3% of all state felony cases went to trial. Because so many cases are pled, the conviction rate overall is quite high for any given prosecutor. But depending on the jurisdiction there is quite a wide array of results for prosecutors who actually go to a jury trial. Last year in Florida for example, only 59% of all state jury trials resulted in any conviction on any charge. That's an overall winning percentage, but it is very, very far from "they don't lose very often when they go to trial." Prosecutors do, in fact, lose quite often in front of juries.
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I can cherry pick too. In Texas its over 80%. In California its over 70%. And here's one for you, one study shows 80 cops over a 12 year period beginning in 2005 have been charged in fatal shootings and only 28 were convicted, barely a third. Most advocates will also strongly contest as fact that only 80 were deemed to be involved in shootings that were sufficiently suspect enough to warrant charges. By any statistical measure more cops should be convicted.

The recent events in Tennessee are also telling. A civilian is being praised by law enforcement authorities and gun rights groups alike for the way he went about detaining two escaped, violent convicts. Everybody is talking about the restraint he showed in alerting police and keeping them covered -- without firing a shot -- until the cops got there. This is a person without all that training and experience that law enforcement officers are supposedly blessed with and he managed to keep two violent fleeing felons alive. Obviously this can't be proven, but how many people here think that the outcome might have been different if these were two young black man on the streets of any large American city? Both my hands are raised high by the way.

Cops are out of control in many jurisdictions. The numbers prove it. And the numbers prove they don't pay the same price the rest of society pays.
 
Re: Cops 4: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

WeAreNDHockey said:
I can cherry pick too. In Texas its over 80%. In California its over 70%. And here's one for you, one study shows 80 cops over a 12 year period beginning in 2005 have been charged in fatal shootings and only 28 were convicted, barely a third. Most advocates will also strongly contest as fact that only 80 were deemed to be involved in shootings that were sufficiently suspect enough to warrant charges. By any statistical measure more cops should be convicted.

The recent events in Tennessee are also telling. A civilian is being praised by law enforcement authorities and gun rights groups alike for the way he went about detaining two escaped, violent convicts. Everybody is talking about the restraint he showed in alerting police and keeping them covered -- without firing a shot -- until the cops got there. This is a person without all that training and experience that law enforcement officers are supposedly blessed with and he managed to keep two violent fleeing felons alive. Obviously this can't be proven, but how many people here think that the outcome might have been different if these were two young black man on the streets of any large American city? Both my hands are raised high by the way.

Cops are out of control in many jurisdictions. The numbers prove it. And the numbers prove they don't pay the same price the rest of society pays.
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Very good post. 👍
 
Re: Cops 4: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

WeAreNDHockey said:
I can cherry pick too. In Texas its over 80%. In California its over 70%. And here's one for you, one study shows 80 cops over a 12 year period beginning in 2005 have been charged in fatal shootings and only 28 were convicted, barely a third. Most advocates will also strongly contest as fact that only 80 were deemed to be involved in shootings that were sufficiently suspect enough to warrant charges. By any statistical measure more cops should be convicted.

The recent events in Tennessee are also telling. A civilian is being praised by law enforcement authorities and gun rights groups alike for the way he went about detaining two escaped, violent convicts. Everybody is talking about the restraint he showed in alerting police and keeping them covered -- without firing a shot -- until the cops got there. This is a person without all that training and experience that law enforcement officers are supposedly blessed with and he managed to keep two violent fleeing felons alive. Obviously this can't be proven, but how many people here think that the outcome might have been different if these were two young black man on the streets of any large American city? Both my hands are raised high by the way.

Cops are out of control in many jurisdictions. The numbers prove it. And the numbers prove they don't pay the same price the rest of society pays.
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I didn't cherry pick, I happen to live in Florida.

Regardless, you cannot take a statistic generated from tens of thousands of trials and then apply it to 80 selected cases and claim only 28 convictions is some sort of terrible injustice based on that only. It's a ludicrous argument. A flipped coin coming up heads 5 times in a row isn't an anomaly, it's insignificant.
 
Re: Cops 4: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

A sample size of 80 is large enough to be significant. Equating it to five coin flips just shows that you're doing the usual false equivalency routine.
 
Re: Cops 4: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Given the large population of cases, a random sampling of 80 cases may get you somewhere around +- 10-15 with high confidence (or a lower range with less confidence) But the selected cases are not a random sample, it's a nonprobability sample. So you guys feel free to explain to me how a sample that specifically excludes 99.99% of the possible population (of cases) gives you a statistically reliable result.
 
Re: Cops 4: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

So worst case scenario you add +15% and now we're at 50% at most? That's still a pretty big disparity from the average conviction rate in most jurisdictions/federal and it's pretty obvious by now that these cases aren't treated like other cases so that's a pretty generous assumption.
 
Re: Cops 4: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

And how many thousands of interactions end with nothing happening? High profile cases are news because it's a rarity (relatively, I won't overstate the rarity).

My point is, many of these cases were handled basically in private. Now we are getting trials. In the Yanez case, a JURY found him not guilty. I really do hope they release the whole court case transcript, I would like to read it to be fully informed of what all went on in the trial. Newsblips and the infamous video don't tell the whole story, obviously.

Yes, there are problem cops, and again, I think in this case (on the surface) the verdict was wrong. IMO, Yanez panicked and over-reacted and now a man is dead. I had said earlier that I don't trust Yanez with a badge, and the way he reacted is the reason. It wasn't malicious, it was he couldn't handle that stressful situation.

And I will stress again, this is my surface judgement, from the info we've seen in the media.
 
Re: Cops 4: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Brenthoven said:
And how many thousands of interactions end with nothing happening? High profile cases are news because it's a rarity (relatively, I won't overstate the rarity).

My point is, many of these cases were handled basically in private. Now we are getting trials. In the Yanez case, a JURY found him not guilty. I really do hope they release the whole court case transcript, I would like to read it to be fully informed of what all went on in the trial. Newsblips and the infamous video don't tell the whole story, obviously.

Yes, there are problem cops, and again, I think in this case (on the surface) the verdict was wrong. IMO, Yanez panicked and over-reacted and now a man is dead. I had said earlier that I don't trust Yanez with a badge, and the way he reacted is the reason. It wasn't malicious, it was he couldn't handle that stressful situation.

And I will stress again, this is my surface judgement, from the info we've seen in the media.
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The problem is that a jury is far more likely to give the benefit of the doubt to the police officer when in reality we give a police a vary important responsibility and he/she should be held to a higher standard than a normal person. If Mr Castillo felt threatened by the cop and shot first for his own safety, I doubt he would have been found not guilty.
 
Shirtless Guy said:
The problem is that a jury is far more likely to give the benefit of the doubt to the police officer when in reality we give a police a vary important responsibility and he/she should be held to a higher standard than a normal person. If Mr Castillo felt threatened by the cop and shot first for his own safety, I doubt he would have been found not guilty.
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Exactly. He was protected by the badge.

Taillight broken
-it wasn't

Didn't keep his hands on the wheel
-Though to do when you're told to show ID

Calling in that a reason for the stop was a wide-set nose?
- Well, that pretty much explains itself.

This dude effed up, and effed up hard. Cost an innocent person their life. But yet he gets to walk. It's completely nuts.
 
Re: Cops 4: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

trixR4kids said:
So worst case scenario you add +15% and now we're at 50% at most? That's still a pretty big disparity from the average conviction rate in most jurisdictions/federal and it's pretty obvious by now that these cases aren't treated like other cases so that's a pretty generous assumption.
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No. The worst cases are 28 too many or 52 too few cops were convicted. We don't know. A RANDOM sample of 80 cases would correlate to the population result at about +- 14. Again the sample isn't random.

If I want to check quality of production on a million widgets I could, at completely random intervals, pull 666 widgets out and check them. If they were all good I would have high confidence that the million were within +- 5 of the specs. If I checked all million and found that they averaged 90% correct, I could RANDOMLY select 666 and have very high confidence they would average between 85-95, because a properly selected random sample has a given probability of correlating with the whole population it is taken from. If instead I select the first 80 widgets made on Tuesday morning, I can say nothing about them. (this is what is going on with the 80 cases) Maybe Monday is bowling night and everyone is hung over and all the widgets suck Tuesday morning and this is what brings down the average. Maybe they're perfect. Excluding the possibility of selecting any of the million widgets made any other time destroys the probability of correlation.

In the coin flipping false equivalency, a million coin flip results has a subset Heads and a subset Tails. A random selection of 666 of these results has a very high probability of coming out 50-50 (+-5). If I don't randomly select and instead choose the subset Heads as my sample, my result would be the statement "Wow! Every time a coin is flipped, it comes up Heads!" (Based on 500,000 data points!)

Without attempting to correct for a whole slew of variables that exist in this subset of court cases involving cops selected over 12 years, you can say nothing about the conviction rate correlating to the average of all cases last year. There is no mathematical basis for it. Maybe in 50 of the cases the victims were convicted felons and maybe juries only rule in favor of convicted felons 40% of the time. Maybe the laws in 45 of the cases favored the defendants. Maybe the law has been changed in some jurisdictions over that time. Maybe a hundred other things. That too few cops were convicted is a statement of belief based on other things. It could be right, it could be wrong, but it cannot be based on this statistic as despite appearances, there is effectively no probability of correlation between them.
 
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Re: Cops 4: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Just my two cents.

First, the notion expressed in this thread (that I've yet to hear expressed anywhere else) that somehow the prosecutor's office just put on a show pony trial and didn't try for a conviction seems like complete nonsense to me. There would be no reason to do that. The reason prosecutors are reluctant to charge cops in the first place is because of the close working relationship they have, and a concern about ruining their relationship with and credibility of the cops they call as witnesses every single day. Once the prosecutors went ahead and charged Yanez, that bridge had been crossed. Nothing for the prosecutor to gain by "bagging it." Personally I'd like to see the evidence that the prosecutors threw this case. Conviction rates don't prove anything.

Second, this wasn't a trial the prosecutors moved out to Simi Valley. Ramsey County is about as politically "blue" as you'll find between the coasts.

The reason the cop was acquitted is that the law (us) give to cops enormous latitude in doing their jobs. If you don't like the legal standard used, change the law. There will be consequences for that, both good and bad, and I won't pretend to know what all of them will be, but that's your solution, not just biatching about it on social media.
 
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