SF cops rub shoulders with LBJ's Great Society in video
A day in the life.
Relatives of thugs like this often claim the cops just don't know how to "care for the mentally ill."
Relatives of thugs like this often claim the cops just don't know how to "care for the mentally ill."
To subdue an unarmed unruly inmate (unarmed usually the case), we did not have guns and did not need guns.
A gun was too easy for a group of inmates to get their hands on. I've done mail calls in cell blocks and you're completely surrounded by inmates.
During the early 80s before we had Tasers and pepper spray, a supervisor would calmly gather enough officers to pile on and subdue the unruly inmate's stupid butt.
That inmate would be placed in a segregation unit where trouble makers were placed in one-man cells.
Sometimes a seg inmate would refuse to exit his cell when ordered.
The first officer in the lead of the cell extraction team carried a shield slammed into the inmate to pin him against the wall where he would be grabbed from two sides and thrown face-first on the floor to be cuffed.
The shield protected the officers from punches and the blade of an always possible concealed weapon.
Extraction teams were provided face masks during the 90s and had Tasers and pepper spray also at their disposal if needed.
Some inmates were overgrown monsters but could always be controlled if with a good deal of effort.
The only seg officer to be killed (the only officer at that prison period for all of my 21 years) disobeyed the standard operational procedure (SOP) written rules.
He lost his temper and acted alone when an inmate threw hot coffee on a nurse. The inmate had a shank. The coffee was thrown to bait the officer into his cell by himself. He was stabbed in the heart.
Yes, there were undoubtedly racially tainted problems in the way criminal laws were enforced in the early part of the 20th century, but the appearance of a true welfare state under LBJ has only institutionalized those problems in my opinion, especially in "minority" populations, making police work these days, illustrated in this instance, even more problematic than it has been--a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.
In Sir Isaac Newton's time perhaps 25% of Englanders lived in London. Men (and women) carried guns and swords because crime was rampant. Fifty years later, the Bow Street Runners were a private association for law enforcement and peacekeeping. What really made it possible for the "bobbies" of 1829 to be unarmed was the fact that thousands of common criminals had been transported first to America and then to Australia.
As a card-carrying criminologist, I assure you that any police chief will tell you that 80% of your problems come form 20% of your addresses in any and every neighborhood. No place is special for crime.
The paradigm of policing probably reached its peak in the 1920s as we moved from the "neighborhood magistrate on patrol" to the era of "professional policing." That new model launched by August Vollmer at Berkeley included college education, but also included the detached professional portrayed by Jack Webb in Dragnet.
Before that, police were political appointees, ward-healers, which is why policing and voting were both defined by "precincts." Justice on the street might come from a baton, but it also included the constable on patrol (COP) who knew the people in his neighborhood well enough to intervene before anyone had to be arrested.
(See "An Officer of the Neighborhood: A Boston Patrolman on the Beat in 1895," by Alexander von Hoffman, reviewed in Journal of Social History, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Winter, 1992), pp. 309-330 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3788423 )