zlacker

>>obilgi+(OP)
A friend lives in Seattle and texted me today about his visit last night:

> I was there last night and it's such a cool pseudo utopian place

> The media coverage of it is WILD

> People on the internet are convinced it's protected by armed guards and people are dying of hunger and instead its...like a music festival campground

> There are speakers, musicians, art walls. I took a group pic for a bunch of black guys last night and they were so proud of what was built because they felt like they fought for it, which in a sense, they did.

>>conroy+fz1
Yep, I’ve been staying in Seattle with my girlfriend since quarantine began. We live about 9 blocks away up Madison and have been walking around the zone almost daily. Hard to believe how much fear-mongering, disinfo, and straight-up lying I see in every thread/post about the subject.

>>everly+IN1
I'm up north about the same distance. Only bad days have been this Sun/Mon with all the gas/flash-bangs and the sheriff's plane flying loops over the city until the wee hours of the morning.

Since the police cleared out, everything has been much MUCH nicer around here.

>>TimSch+iZ1
As someone who has never been to Seattle, I am shocked by how bad your police department appears to be. Even the LAPD behaved ... well, less bad from what I’d heard.

Flash bangs? Those are for assaulting buildings, not crowd control.

>>ashton+q22
I mean, it's par for the course across America during protests. It's important to remember "less than lethal" doesn't mean safe - I saw a photo of a dude who's eye was.. exploded by a tear gas canister. Forget where that was but it was not Seattle.

If anything's weird about the Seattle PD, it could be they remember the 1999 WTO protests and want to crush them this time. But overall they all seem to be around the same -- very low -- standard

>>sterli+am2
The other issue I've noticed with the less-than-lethal ordnance use is that in order to be non-lethal, they need to be used according to manufacturer guidelines. I've used rubber coated bullets, bean-bag guns, and flashbangs. The police are not using them according to non-lethal guidelines. Example:

Rubber coated bullets have explicit instructions to be aimed at shin height or below. This is because everything below the knees doesn't have large masses of non-muscular soft tissue, reducing the chances of permanent injury. These rounds are designed to hit the ground first, lose some velocity, and skip into crowds, causing pain but not debilitating injuries. I haven't seen a SINGLE video of police using them like this. It's absolutely insane.

>>crafti+fX2
I imagine its because all their other training, all their range practice, is to shoot at center of mass three times in a burst. Hard to change in the heat of the riot.

>>JoeAlt+zX2
I would say this is spot on from what I've heard. When emotions are this high ( look at the cops faces when they are exposed ) there's nothing but muscle memory.

I took a class on active shooter scenarios where they focused on that "be careful how you train" aspect with the illustration that a police officer ( no idea where ) once responded to a call where an armed man pointed a pistol right at the cop close range. The cop quickly disarmed the man, but then returned the firearm to the man, whereupon the man shot him dead.

In drilling the technique he used to disarm the man, police would practice in pairs, taking turns disarming each other from the draw. This meant that two officers would stand facing each other, pistols in holsters. One officer would draw, the other would disarm, hold the weapon pointed at the first officer for a beat, then return it to the first officer in order to draw his or her own weapon.

Then when you start to hear about corrections departments sending officers for crowd control... the animal instincts and things these guys are trained for is so volatile.

>>camero+ig3
I think it’s worth asking why the cops are so angry at these protestors. We didn’t see this level of police anger and misconduct during the protests over the lock down, but during these protests the cops appear to be furious in a way I have never seen before.

>>ashton+mi3
is this a rhetorical question? the protestors are calling for anything from decreasing police department funding to abolishing it altogether. I'm sure there's a diversity of viewpoints within the movement, but to a cop it looks like a big crowd of people trying to eliminate their job. this certainly doesn't excuse their actions, but it's not hard to see why this would be upsetting.

>>leetcr+tT3
My gut instinct is that the “abolish the police” crowd, however you define it, got much louder after the violent reprisals. My belief is that a lot of cops attacked when the protests were more about anger over police brutality in general and George Floyd’s murder in particular, which hints to an even darker motivation than keeping their jobs.

And if they thought brutal reprisals were a good plan to keep their jobs ... oh boy. They did not plan that out well. The level of sudden radicalization against the police has been breath taking.