zlacker

>>sorami+(OP)
I read through the whole complaint and it's a pretty shocking catalog of abuse of power, discretion, and force. And it only covers actions against journalists, and only in the city of Minneapolis.

>>zucker+Kb
It shouldn't be shocking for anyone who was paying attention. There is a good book about related issues by Radley Balco called Rise of the Warrior Cop. Published in 2013. Unlike many comments here and on other websites it's not hysterical, or hyperbolic or contaminated with self-referential post-modernist bullshit. It is a sober and factual analysis of how American police became what it is right now. It's not an easy read, but it's a must-read for anyone who wants to have a reasonable picture of the problem.

The public notion of good policing and the actual practices police departments follow have been diverging for several decades (if they ever converged). What we're seeing right now is not some inexplicable increase in bad behavior or cops deliberately targeting journalists. For modern American police this is just business as usual, except the volume of deployment is significantly higher than in the past few decades and the visibility is much higher as well.

Edit:

There is a flip side to this coin. When you have a systemic problem of this scale, you should be cautious about making simplistic (especially moral) judgements about individuals in the system. When someone's training, incentives, position in the community and even equipment nudge them towards bad actions, even decent people will routinely do bad things.

>>collle+Hr
Don't get me wrong, I understand police violence is a continuing problem, but that doesn't make this instance of it less shocking.

As a meta note, I've noticed that people often respond to comments saying "I'm shocked with a recent occurrence of X" with "X has always been bad and been happening for a long time" and in my opinion that response only serves to desensitize people to the bad thing.

>>zucker+Xu
The problem is that people are already desensitized. They've watched X come and go and they act shocked every time. Then they continue to push it down their list of priorities when they vote.

By next week this will be pushed out of the news. By November it will be completely forgotten, except among the minority who it directly affects and were already aware. All of the outrage you hear now will not translate into change.

So when people say "X has been bad for a long time", people need to hear that as "and this time you should remember it and do something".