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-Indemnification |
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-Officers don’t take accountability because cities end up paying, means the aff doesn’t give incentive to stop police brutality |
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-Schwartz 2k14 Schwartz, Joanna C. "Police indemnification." (2014). NYU Law |
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-This Article empirically examines an issue central to judicial and scholarly debate about civil rights |
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-AND |
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-and compensation goals of 42 U.S.C. § 1983. |
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-This practice of indemnification is devastating for communities of color—cities just increase taxes which hurts Brown and Black bodies who fall victim to the police misconduct in the first place |
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-Phillip 15, Abby. "Why the Poor Often Pay for Police Misconduct with Their Pocketbooks." Washington Post. The Washington Post, 03 June 2015. Web. 17 Nov. 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/06/03/why-the-poor-and-disadvantaged-often-pay-for-police-misconduct-with-their-pocketbooks/?utm_term=.019efe59ae21. SM |
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-Floyd Dent, a black man from Inkster, Mich., was pulled over for a routine traffic stop in January when a white Inkster police officer dragged Dent out of his vehicle, put him in an apparent choke-hold, punched him repeatedly in the head and used a stun gun on him. That officer, William Melendez, was fired and is now on trial, charged with misconduct in office and mistreatment of a prisoner, after dashboard camera video of the incident became public. And now the residents of the small Michigan town will pay the cost for Melendez’s conduct — literally. Late last month, the city of Inkster settled a lawsuit with Dent for nearly $1.4 million. According to the Detroit Free Press, Inkster’s financial manager said the city would levy a tax on property owners to help cover the cost of compensating Dent. Inkster is a city of about 25,000 residents, according to the most recent Census figures, and the median income there is just $26,500. Seventy-three percent of Inkster’s residents are black, and nearly 40 percent of the people in the city live below the poverty line. There is a bitter irony to the situation, but it’s not unusual that the very people who are most beset by police violence are the ones who wind up paying for it with their pocketbooks. When victims or their families are paid out by cities and municipalities in excessive-force cases that are settled or tried, taxpayers pay every time, highlighting the direct relationship between the social and financial costs of police violence. In Chicago: $84 million in one year. Los Angeles: $54 million. Philadelphia: $40 million in cases brought since 2009. Fatal police shootings in 2015 approaching 400 nationwide In Inkster, the sum is small and deals with just one case. But for its residents, the reality will be unavoidable: The tax will amount to a $178.67 on a home valued at about $55,400, the Free Press estimates. “The price of this is enormous, and it probably is hardest on those who can least afford it and whose communities are most egregiously beset with the misconduct problems,” noted Andy Shaw, president and CEO of the Better Government Association, which has studied the high financial and social costs of police misconduct in Chicago. U.S. cities pay out millions to settle police lawsuits In Chicago, police-related settlements over the last decade cost the city more than $500 million according to a study published by the group last year. Everyone pays the price, including renters who are likely to be least able to afford it. “They not only face the financial burden and the reduction of services, these dollars could have improved their schools could have given them more cops on the streets to improve their neighborhoods,” Shaw said. “Instead they were transfer payments to victims and victims’ attorneys.” Shaw added: “It takes a terrible toll.” In Inkster, residents are asking why they will now be forced to shoulder this burden. “It’s not our responsibility that there was mistakes made with the police department and the city,” resident Juanita Davis told WDIV in Detroit. Thousands of people fatally shot by police, few prosecutions “It is absolutely true that the innocent citizens in Inkster shouldn’t have to put up with this, and they don’t have to,” said Dan Korobkin, deputy legal director of the ACLU of Michigan. “They ought to demand of their city council people, of their mayor, of their police chief and police officers — all of whom are accountable to the public — that they police this city by respecting the people of the city and complying with basic principles of decency and the constitution. |
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-Poverty is the worst form of structural violence, its death toll is greater than even a nuclear war |
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-Gilligan 96 |
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-James, Professor of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, Director of the Center for the Study of Violence, and a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the National Campaign Against Youth Violence, “Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes”, p. 191-196 |
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-The deadliest form of violence is poverty. You cannot work for one day with the violent people who fill our prisons and mental hospitals for the criminally insane without being forcible and constantly reminded of the extreme poverty and discrimination that characterizes their lives. Hearing about their lives, and about their families and friends, you are forced to recognize the truth in Gandhi’s observation that the deadliest form of violence is poverty. Not a day goes by without realizing that trying to understand them and their violent behavior in purely individual terms is impossible and wrong-headed. Any theory of violence, especially a psychological theory, that evolves from the experience of men in maximum security prisons and hospitals for the criminally insane must begin with the recognition that these institutions are only microcosms. They are not where the major violence in our society takes place, and the perpetrators who fill them are far from being the main causes of most violent deaths. Any approach to a theory of violence needs to begin with a look at the structural violence in this country. Focusing merely on those relatively few men who commit what we define as murder could distract us from examining and learning from those structural causes of violent death that are for more significant from a numerical or public health, or human, standpoint. By “structural violence” I mean the increased rates of death, and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as contrasted with the relatively low death rates experienced by those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a demonstrably large proportion of them) are a function of class structure; and that structure itself is a product of society’s collective human choices, concerning how to distribute the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting “structural” with “behavioral violence,” by which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in warfare, capital punishment, and so on. Structural violence differs from behavior violence in at least three major respects. *The lethal effects of structural violence operate continuously, rather than sporadically, whereas murders, suicides, executions, wars, and other forms of behavior violence occur one at a time. *Structural violence operates more or less independently of individual acts; independent of individuals and groups (politicians, political parties, voters) whose decisions may nevertheless have lethal consequences for others. *Structural violence is normally invisible, because it may appear to have had other (natural or violent) causes. CONTINUED The finding that structural violence causes far more deaths than behavioral violence does is not limited to this country. Kohler and Alcock attempted to arrive at the number of excess deaths caused by socioeconomic inequities on a worldwide basis. Sweden was their model of the nation that had come closest to eliminating structural violence. It had the least inequity in income and living standards, and the lowest discrepancies in death rates and life expectancy; and the highest overall life expectancy of the world. When they compared the life expectancies of those living in the other socioeconomic systems against Sweden, they found that 18 million deaths a year could be attributed to the “structural violence” to which the citizens of all the other nations were being subjected. During the past decade, the discrepancies between the rich and poor nations have increased dramatically and alarmingly. The 14 to 19 million deaths a year caused by structural violence compare with about 100,000 deaths per year from armed conflict. Comparing this frequency of deaths from structural violence to the frequency of those caused by major military and political violence, such as World War II (an estimated 49 million military and civilian deaths, including those by genocide – or about eight million per year, 1939-1945), the Indonesian massacre of 1965-66 (perhaps 575,000 deaths), the Vietnam war (possibly two million, 1954-1973), and even a hypothetical nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (232 million), it was clear that even war cannot being to compare with structural violence, which continues year after year. In other words, every fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide, perpetrated on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. Structural violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence on a socially and epidemiologically significant scale (from homicide and suicide to war and genocide). The question as to which of the two forms of violence – structural or behavioral – is more important, dangerous, or lethal is moot, for they are inextricably related to eachother, as cause to effect. |