They still get to wear their uniforms and all that shit when off duty? I was aware of off duty cops getting ridiculous gigs like that but it sounds like these guys were out there looking like cops.
Yup. And these gigs are super easy. Like waaaaaaay easier than his actual police work.
Say there’s a construction project that needs to block off a lane of traffic for the day, and send trucks in and out…that’s an 8 hour shift and $4-500 in your pocket. For just standing around. That’s how he paid for all of his vacations.
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I’m pretty sure my MPD buddy did these gigs in and out of uniform. But I am nearing the limit of my knowledge regarding how it’s done in general.
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This has been getting some visibility in Seattle recently.
Among police departments, Seattle pays the highest wages in Washington state. But within city government, the electric utility pays even more for their services.
Seattle City Light pays $90 an hour for cops to direct traffic, a rate earned by only the top 2% of the Seattle Police Department’s payroll. On Sundays and holidays, when City Light pays $139 an hour, not even the interim police chief earns more.
But City Light is not paying the officers directly. It is hiring them off-duty through Seattle’s Finest Security and Traffic Control LLC, a for-profit firm that has collected $13.7 million from the utility over the past decade. It isn’t clear how much Seattle’s Finest pays officers but it is likely a premium over SPD, where most officers make less than $60 an hour.
The city of Seattle’s practice of hiring its own cops for off-duty work is the visible tip of a much larger market, where officers equipped by the public wield their police powers to serve private clients.
Many U.S. cities allow cops to supplement their incomes with moonlighting work. But few have less control than Seattle, where working off-duty is written into the police union contract and the city’s efforts to overhaul it — including a law and an executive order in 2017 — have gone nowhere.
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Cops directing traffic for fucking Starbucks? FFS, have higher standards for your coffee America.
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My understanding is most of those gigs are handled by auxiliary officers who are part time and don’t carry guns. My Super has that gig in a suburb. I’ve seen them directing traffic outside a cemetery on busy days and I understand they work larger religious gatherings.
The MPD 3rd precinct last year:
I think that your point can be congruent with the one that Davis is making. You are correct to point out that when an institution that the owning class uses as a method of exploitation or enforcement is abolished, they will obfuscate the nature and/or purpose of the institutions they erect in their place.
For example, when she says slavery, she is referring to chattel slavery, which is a master–slave relationship. That specific type of relationship has been abolished (legally, although the constitutional amendment carved out an exception for people who are imprisoned–hence part of the need to abolish the PIC), and diminished (yet there are still people being held in bondage).
After the abolition of chattel slavery, the practice of sharecropping allowed the former masters to exploit the former slaves in similar, yet not as grotesque ways. Present day we have people who are wage slaves. These types of exploiter/exploited relationships, and the institutions that enforce them, will need to be dismantled and abolished. That is the struggle.
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I guess you’d have to ask them what specific points they found compelling, and then deal with those points specifically. The author, Arthur Jeon, doesn’t do a full-on Gish Gallop, but it is close to it. He also leans on the old “well, we couldn’t know what was going on in this specific police officer’s secret inner heart at the exact moment that they pulled the trigger that killed that Black person”, ergo saying that racism was in play is unfair…I guess if it can’t be proven with 100% certainty, then it can’t be a contributing factor.
Jeon concludes the article:
Well, part of having an honest conversation would be Jeon being honest as well. To me, that would include having some level of nuance that doesn’t lump for-profit corporate media in with BLM activists or “progressives”. His implication here is that BLM & progressives haven’t started to do what he believes they should be doing.
What does Jeon think they should be doing? They should be talking about among other things black-on-black crime:
First, there are many nuanced and in-depth conversations among activists and others on the Left, that those conversations are not given much time on corporate media is not the fault of the Left. Second, that Jeon does not even know if these conversations are going on is an indictment of his lack of curiosity or ability to google. Of course, that would require him to acquire information that runs contrary to his preferred narrative that he is attempting to advance. Much easier to accuse your opponents of not doing something based upon the rock solid evidence that you personally have not seen or heard it.
Here’s Jeon having a very “honest” conversation–a strawman wrapped in bad faith, tucked inside a “actually the libs are the real racists”.
^^^^^ Sure, that may sound like received wisdom to someone who reads Reason articles uncritically.
^^^^^Black people, shielded from scrutiny in America…since when? Just an honest dude, asking honest questions…
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I’m too lazy to google, but this strikes me as a BS stat. A reminder that people like this frequently cite all sorts of wrong, misinterpreted, cherry-picked or just plain fraudulent statistics.
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Cite please.
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All 4 officers have been charged with federal civil rights violation.
So, the movement is “about” something that its name not only doesn’t mean but actually condemns?
The lack of fealty to Letter From Birmingham Jail is jarring.
Feels rough to be so owned by such a genuine intellectual force.
That wasn’t exactly a paean to the incarceration system if memory serves.
It wasn’t exactly an encomium to the virtues of incrementalism either.
This seems like a metaphor…
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Should have white washed it for maximum clarity.
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That’s a pretty misleading headline. They paved it over because they’re doing utility work. They’re going to repaint some kind of mural and keep it dedicated as Black Lives Matter plaza.