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Insurers force change on police departments long resistant to it [washingtonpost.com]

 
By Kimberly Kindy, Photograph: Provided by Rana Law Group, The Washington Post, September 14, 2022

The high cost of settlements over police misconduct has led insurers to demand police departments overhaul tactics or forgo coverage

ST. ANN, Mo. — A patrol officer spotted a white minivan with an expired license plate, flipped on his lights and siren, and when the driver failed to stop, gave chase. The driver fled in rush-hour traffic at speeds of up to 90 mph, as other officers joined in the pursuit. Ten miles later, the van slammed into a green Toyota Camry, leaving its 55-year-old driver, Brent Cox, permanently disabled.

That 2017 police chase was at the time the latest in a long line of questionable vehicle pursuits by officers of the St. Ann Police Department. Eleven people had been injured in 19 crashes during high-speed pursuits over the two prior years. Social justice activists and reporters were scrutinizing the department, and Cox and others were suing.

Undeterred, St. Ann Police Chief Aaron Jimenez stood behind the high-octane pursuits and doubled down on the department’s decades-old motto: “St. Ann will chase you until the wheels fall off.”

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A few successful social/labor uprisings notwithstanding, notably the Bolshevik and French revolutions, it seems to me that the superfluously rich and powerful essentially have always had the police and military ready to foremost protect their power/money interests, even over the basic needs of the masses.

Even today, the police and military can, and probably would, claim they must bust heads to maintain law and order as a priority; therefore, the absurdly unjust inequities and inequalities can persist. Thus, I can imagine there were/are lessons learned from those successful social/labor uprisings — a figurative How to Hinder Progressive Revolutions 101, perhaps? — with the clarity of hindsight by the big power/money interests in order to avoid any repeat of such great wealth/power losses. ...

More to the point, as much as we need law-enforcers, to have a reasonable idea of how police will generally behave towards the public they are meant to serve, one must understand what underlying nature/desire motivated them to their profession to start with (e.g. for ‘power’ reasons, maybe), though perhaps subconsciously. 

Admittedly, many, if not most, of us as children have fantasized about, and even planned for, a future working in some capacity with the police or military. But almost all of us, probably sooner than later, grew out of that dream, as it wasn’t reflective of our true nature.

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