I have another angle for this, which is we have to clearly identify a path where legitimate policing can occur, but aims to end police misconduct systematically.
Edit: Why was this down-voted? And why was the post itself flagged?
The number of people that die is only a subset of the total number of victims of police brutality. Besides that, the topic is broader than just the number of deaths. The police represent the state and thus represent the escalating willingness of the state to abuse it's citizens.
https://twitter.com/JordanUhl/status/1266917228752056320
https://twitter.com/mollypshe/status/1266934680273727491
https://twitter.com/chalametvol6/status/1267059474591879171
https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/126694270336910540...
https://twitter.com/zellieimani/status/1267057207172050944
https://twitter.com/stephenjadler/status/1267153715674349568
2. There is so much more to it than just the number of people who have died. Entire populations live in fear of contacts with the police.
Not trolling, legitimately asking this. It feels like every year some viral video comes out where police do something horrible, it feels like little progress has been made on the issue. Is it simply a visibility problem?
Edit to add for examples:
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gu5pqj/a_veteran_prot...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gtx9am/the_police_tak...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gtzxn3/were_stronger_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gtu8tp/a_protester_an...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gttacf/its_not_white_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gtq55f/at_a_peaceful_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gu6rdi/police_support...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gtr8un/a_conversation...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gu5lrf/its_not_black_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gu6dsz/police_kneelin...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gu4ptc/we_need_more_o...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gtlla0/a_californian_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gtynyd/genesee_county...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gtxiq5/found_this_pic...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gu60jr/protestors_and...
https://www.reddit.com/r/UpliftingNews/comments/gtrjby/genes...
https://twitter.com/ZachandMattShow/status/12672081705749381...
And some abuse..
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gtsbs8/like_a_boss/
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gtqpre/new_york_state...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gu1qgy/cop_in_full_ri...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gu02su/a_child_after_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/gu10qz/law_enforcemen...
Compilation video - https://www.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/comments/gtvcup/share_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/gu5yru/us_s...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/gtvet8/rubber_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gu2hdi/innocent_shopp...
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/gu629x/nurs...
https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1267033010295042048
.... and on and on and on... There will be 1000s to 10,000s of events to catalogue.
This is happening in Santa Cruz right now where local homeless “advocates” (more about themselves) are attempting to co-opt a protest to blaming SCPD on perceived slights regarding homeless issues. This is a normal tactic for this group.
Society doesn’t actually have to solve one problem at a time. And that would lead to some pretty bizarre outcomes.
Other people rarely or never see coverage though, and aren’t even close to having widespread understanding of the issue of police brutality and it’s relationship with systemic racism, so much more reporting and media production needs to be done.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/gu3s6j/poli...
The list is growing by the hour.
Cops in America need to learn very quickly that their power comes only from the consent of the people they police, or they will be made to understand that fact.
Anonymous-site-as-a-service must be a thing.
Several generations of recorded American history tell us: no.
Decent ethical sense tells us: absolutely, emphatically no.
Nothing about this is simple.
If IPFS is out of the question, I'd look for hosting services that talk openly about being censorship-resistant. Won't give any links, but there are a couple, even if slightly shady looking.
i have witnessed Police brutality first hand. Even here where we dont go through much of the authoritarian training americans are used to, i.e christian churches with heavy influence - here religion is merely a nostalgic thing.
I know also that even here victims of Police brutality basically have No Chance of retaliation.
That beeing said, a video that looks ugly does not necessarily mean the Police acted wrong.
Ok i bite, Link a Video and i will come up with a story that atleast explains the police behaviour, If not justifies it.
I think this is really important in any scenario like this where it feels like "us vs them".
Outrage shines a light, but that is merely step one. If people really want change they need to imagine what it feels like to be someone in the other "group", and remember it's not comprised 100% assholes. Those other non-assholes need to know they are supported and appreciated - knowing that makes a huge difference to how likely they are to police themselves and lead by example.
If you want to fan the flames, though, add a section for protesters savagely kicking unconscious victims in the head.
Violence against citizens:
https://twitter.com/stribrooks/status/1266186985041022976
https://twitter.com/chieffymac11/status/1266884475268616197
https://twitter.com/tkerssen/status/1266921821653385225
https://twitter.com/KCJ_Swish/status/1266913464234237954
https://twitter.com/Booker4KY/status/1266895243913367553
Violence against reporters:
https://twitter.com/chieffymac11/status/1266884475268616197
https://twitter.com/cjzero/status/1266921035800199170
https://twitter.com/MikeGeorgeCBS/status/1266919447970942986
https://twitter.com/MichaelAdams317/status/12669452685676789...
https://twitter.com/TinaDesireeBerg/status/12669224135911055...
https://twitter.com/PLBarghouty/status/1266922618122354690
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1266910910137995264
https://twitter.com/NewDay/status/1266315061209030658
Police slashing tires of cars left parked in parking lots:
https://twitter.com/andrewkimmel/status/1266987126467461120
https://twitter.com/brandiiimariiie/status/12669756143781519...
https://twitter.com/val_ebertz/status/1266975058230235137
Examples of good policing:
https://twitter.com/midmichigannow/status/126690773673595699...
https://twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1266895422397779968
Just one for a little bit of laughter in this depressing time:
If you host the videos on something like youtube or dailymotion and then embed them it will take the load off your server. Just keep the originals in case they get taken down so you can switch to a different service. Hope this helps! Feel free to PM me if you need assistance.
Some options here: https://kinsta.com/blog/video-hosting/
It really is that easy.
All of the requests on their website seem reasonable and it was really illuminating doing research on my local police force and seeing how few of them they've enacted.
I clicked this. It contains a apparently completely baseless claim that a masked looter is an "undercover cop". The claim also has been denied by the St. Paul police department.
Is it your intention to discredit claims of police brutality by repeating apparently false ones?
Team A builds a feature that detects when the device is in a localized area. (This already exists)
Team B builds a feature that disables the camera. (I could see this being a parental control)
Both features are reasonable by themselves. It's when they are combined that they become an issue. The trick is that Teams A and B don't know of each other's existence.
Maybe you don't create a site, but resurface the content on different social media.
Why not try to build evidence to determine the reality of the situation? There is nothing honest or good about building a one-sided repository that serves only to confirm political dogma.
What if a fair judgement of the evidence shows that black police officers treat black people no better than white police officers? What if white police officers treat black people better than black police officers on average?
Of course, I'm sure someone biased enough can invent an explanation for any contrary evidence. But the of the situation might be very different from the current propaganda.
Regardless of the policing data, the root cause is unarguably a fundamentally economic problem.
Poverty is synonymous with violence. Policing is synonymous with violence.
By turning a class problem (rich people stealing/rigging the system) into a racial issue (white people are bad and should feel bad) you're doing the bidding of the rich people that want to prevent revolutionary economic reform.
Edit: Flagged in 60 seconds. There is no way this comment violates the HN guidelines. If you disagree, just downvote, don't abuse the flagging system.
More broadly, the entire narrative of police brutality and killings of minorities is basically nonsense. When controlling for violent encounters with police and crimes committed, blacks (armed and unarmed) are actually less likely to be killed by police than whites.
Sites like this and an irresponsible media simply exaggerate the issue and needlessly inflame tensions without providing proper and necessary context.
The more recent history suggests that the people who wish to deter or educate the cops are significantly outgunned, and the brutality will continue until such time that those trying to change the status quo will give up, as they stand no chance of victory in the physical battle this has become.
See also: Hong Kong
I frequently wonder if these police would be so eager for a fight with sticks if some fraction of the protesters were carrying the same rifles as their opponents. In theory, that is legal there, and I hope more people take the peaceful, rights-based approach that the Black Panthers did.
This is like saying building a registry/counting murders has no value and brings no insight.
And this has nothing todo with condoning violence of protesters, which is just as wrong as police brutality. The issue is, that police never seems to be held accountable for excessive use of force.
Make it static.
Be able to deploy quickly to a new host if need be.
There is a very large difference between random protesters committing violent acts and government sanctioned organizations with the legal right to shoot and kill implementing a wide spread program of violence and brutality. If you cannot see the difference, then you are not looking. If an officer observes another officer committing a crime and does not intervene then that officer is corrupt. At each of these police brutality incidents there are often a number of officers observing and not intervening.
When the system designed to enforce the law routinely breaks it without punishment then the system is broken and needs to be rebuilt.
Maybe you should check your biases.
And here you go,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/judge-releases...
Tell me why this guy deserved to die for losing at a game of Simon Says.
Protests now, and when you get home, call, email, and write letters to every person that conceivably has authority over how the police act. Don't relent. They did arrest the murderer, after all.
When a failure in the system happens, it needs to be magnified, studied, dissected, and the system must evolve to make sure it doesn't happen again. This is how we have safer nuclear plants, airplanes, etc. And in human systems too: coal miners and people on oil rigs have adopted new protocols to help their workers be more safe. The police is not immune. One act of brutality must be documented, post-mortemed, debugged, and mitigated.
At first I said to myself "he didn't do it, he isn't a cop..." and then I started to think about the source of the information.
I'm not taking sides here. I don't know if he did it or not. I just like to question all sources at this point. Just because they say they didn't do it, doesn't mean they didn't do it.
They should not be included in your list. You know as well as I do that people are going to lie about it. It does no one any good to include things like that.
Sadly, judging by the videos that's an overwhelming majority of the police force
https://lawandcrime.com/crazy/video-shows-officer-kicking-wo...
You're talking about this oft-shared video, I imagine:
https://twitter.com/LibertyHangout/status/126692640226952396...
Yea, wow, those protesters really did a number on that guy. Obviously he was just defending his shop from Thugs, right?
Oh wait... no. He was a crazy person running at protesters with a sword:
https://twitter.com/sable_sonya/status/1267148333203800064
And look at that, those Thugs, after protecting themselves from him, then took on the role of First Responder, and started treating him:
https://twitter.com/ElijahSchaffer/status/126692749194958848...
The other angle is memes. I think that bumper sticker politics is more relevant today than when it was on actual bumpers.
* police are falsely accused of bad behavior frequently, which can make it much harder to identify the actual extreme few bad apples which need to be identified and removed
* all accused are innocent until proven guilty regardless of their profession or who they are. You don’t want police accused of horrible conduct policing but at the same time they need a process of defense, as does everybody
Honestly, much of this problem could be addressed by mandating body cams. I have known police officers who live by their body cams to ensure everyone is honest. Until that happens what would you suggest to change the current situation?
How come cops in many other countries are so much better at making these judgement calls than in the US?
Data literally supports what I'm saying. A distorting narrative is what's driving all the recent calls to action and solidarity. People are being lied to and misled, either that or they are just using the narrative to push their own agendas.
Then these young people (in the U.S.) should stop fighting for gun control when it only works against them in times such as these. Can you imagine how these protesters would be treated if most of them were carrying a rifle?
Could the police roll out tanks in response? Sure, but I do not believe the U.S. politicians would be willing to start all out war between police and civilians.
I don't condone the looting and destruction of property. Having said that the curfews in place are a form of suppression/muzzling the peaceful protesters.
The police have for too long had unchecked power in the U.S. I've always been taught to be respectful and have been treated in kind in my interactions with police (but I am white.) If a cop is having a bad day or he's just a bully, that should not keep bystanders from helping a victim of police brutality with the threat of "assaulting a police officer."
I have no intention of becoming an "enemy of the state", but I also never imagined I'd be living in this dystopian timeline.
* Date of incident
* Short description of context
* Primary source, or at least, where the video was found
* Media coverage of incident
* Updates on convictions/official investigations into the incident
* Official statements / responses
* linked videos (videos of the same incident, but with other view-angle)
edit: formatting
What would you even compare instances of police brutality against? Is there some kind of threshold under which you think police brutality is okay? Should there be a rule that each police force gets one free brutalising a year? Or is it just that if their actions are only a little bit of brutality, just a pinch, that they should get away with it?
No one has to ask what to compare it to, because in this circumstance it's a stupid question that distracts from the immediate reality of the situation: Anything adequately described as police brutality that goes uninvestigated & unpunished is unacceptable.
As a society we give police a monopoly on civilian violence, it is only reasonable to expect the holders of that power to be held to the highest possible standards.
But the justice system signals the exact opposite, by systematially protecting even the worst cops from the consequences of their actions. This, I believe, lies at the core of the people's rage. I for one think that rage is justified.
You might say, well, that particular case happened in <whatever city where that particular case happened>, so people there are concerned. Of course, and that's fine. I'm sure there are things they can reform in that police department. But how does that explain the support protests around the world?
It's a big political manipulation.
You know how we have some people worth billions and simultaneously people literally digging through garbage for food?
That's not an accident, it's a constant built into this species, unless we start doing some eugenics, preventing idiots from breeding, which'll take far longer than your lifetime to come into effect.
You interested in attempting to improve this species your whole life, getting nothing but shit for it and dying without seeing any fruits of your labor? I'm not and neither is anyone else who's not a fundamentalist idiot.
So yes, spineless and unethical is everyday reality. If you don't want to deal with it, go into academia or get a high paying job. Once you spend some time around people who know how to behave themselves, you'll be the one asking for a police state to protect you from the masses upsetting your privileged existence. Funny how that works :)
What do you think America and Europe are, but military states preventing the rest of the world from invading their cushy way of life? How awful right? Let's open all borders and have freedom for everyone. Right, alright then.
The second link doesn't seem to have any video. But head-kicking beyond the point of unconsciousness is not how I would defend myself from a crazy person (if that's even a factual take).
The third link is hard to interpret, but until someone analyzes it, I assume that the people assisting the guy are not the same ones that were committing wanton savagery. But bless them, in any case.
I turned to my wife after seeing the first video and remarked, "These guys just gave the fall election to Trump.". If you're old enough to remember Nixon, you'll take the reference.
Had Minneapolis have to burn to the ground, so that they finally arrest the murderer policeman?
The officer charged with murdering George Floyd has been charged with police brutality 12 times, and let off with "no discipline" every time [0].
If officers who used excessive force aren't punished, they are taught that their actions were acceptable. I'd like to see calls for punishment in the case of Derek Chauvin, as well as for any use of excessive violence. I think convicting Derek Chauvin for murder would set a new standard for police conduct that could prevent similar acts of excessive violence from happening in the future.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/LPOTL/comments/gsespz/derek_chauvin...
I have only good intentions. Doing something illegal could be shifting rapidly. Trump intends to make antifa a terrorist organization (of which I have zero affiliation and conflicted feelings about). I believe that action is but a taste of what is to come.
The better solution is unarmed police: billions of people live in localities where most police they encounter don't have guns and may not be even authorized to make physical contact in the case of a conflict. The idea that all police must carry guns and must be ready to use violence "to protect us" is one of those assumptions you assume must be universal until you somehow find out that it very particular to certain locations.
Furthermore, incidents like this have really made me reconsider my objections to the panopticon. These days, I think we'd be better off if there were cameras everywhere always, broadcasting instantaneously for public capture.
I saw a live broadcast on one of the 24-hour live cable news channels last night. Everyone had their phones out recording everything from every angle. The technology is becoming ubiquitous. Bodycams and their video recordings can be misused or edited. So too can field recordings by protesters and agents saboteur.
More recordings means more checksums against tampering, deletion, and improper framing of real-world events.
PS. site should be back up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
The gap with other first world countries is absolutely enormous.
Like kneeling on someone's neck for minutes. Yeah. I hope you dropped this: /s
The officer in question has been fired, arrested, and charged. That would seem to contradict the "never held accountable".
People were gathering, peacefully, until the cops show up. The evidence is linked all around you. But like I said - go see for yourself, head to your city hall's protests today.
Cops here are very well trained in de-escalation. Something American police probably never heard about.
I recently found out about an app from the ACLU specifically for recording//reporting (abusive) police activities.
The app itself, at least the California version, has a section regarding one's rights and safety whilst filming police.
https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-po....
An effort perhaps quixotic at best, it's worth thinking about. We are at a tipping point in civilization and I don't want to complicit that going the wrong way.
That is only one of the reports in that lengthy tweet thread. And it's not baseless, here is the evidence for it: https://twitter.com/dyllyp/status/1266166402521522176
Here's the tweet where the St. Paul police department denied it: https://twitter.com/sppdmn/status/1266202225677910022
Posted 2.5 hours after the original claim - fast investigation for the police to clear themselves of all wrongdoing.
> Is it your intention to discredit claims of police brutality by repeating apparently false ones?
Lol.
Everyone accepts that the police have a hard job to do, yet the system has grown to shield bad officers from justice and reduce public accountability. This is a system driven by institutionalized racism.
If you find yourself in a riot, leave. Common sense and common decency, no?
Have you read about what happened during the Civil Rights Movement? How many MAGAs would even blink if police started killing Black people?
More recently MOVE was bombed and no politicians thought twice.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/10/move-1985-bo...
Should have mentioned which JS framework was used to build the site so the post would stay on the front page.
"When controlling for violent encounters with police and crimes committed, blacks (armed and unarmed) are actually less likely to be killed by police than whites." Legitimate Source required? This study seems to indicate black men are killed by the police at a rate of 2.5x that of white men.
Your argument essentially boils down to sure cops brutally kill people and get away with it but its really the media that is at fault for bringing this to the surface. If we just let the cops do what they want everything would be calm and those uppity minorities would know their place.
"Sites like this and an irresponsible media simply exaggerate the issue and needlessly inflame tensions without providing proper and necessary context." Just so I can understand can you please explain the context missing from the video depicting the murder of George Floyd, the source of these nationwide protests. Also please explain why his fellow officers stood around watching and what would have happened if the media had not elevated this incident. Please use small words as I am just some guy that thinks that even a single case of cops getting away with murder is far too many.
All in all this comment is pretty disgusting.
The bad apples should be removed. Riots and mayhem work against that goal.
I cannot see any downsides to systematically documenting instances of police brutality and demanding justice for each instance. It seems entirely just to me.
A football player kneeling peacefully as a stand against police misconduct and being called a son of a bitch by the President doesn’t get a peep from HN. People start rioting gets attention.
There are 2 outcomes here:
1) You get shot immediately by the police, chaos ensues but at the end of the day you're still dead.
2) You shoot them, harm/kill them and if their colleagues don't shoot you back there's still more than enough proof out there to bring you a lifetime of legal troubles, especially considering "self defense" laws don't apply when it's against police.
In both cases, you're either dead or in the shit and nothing gets fixed. The US already proved that they couldn't give a shit about police brutality (otherwise we wouldn't have these protests to begin with) so more civilian kills on the leaderboard is just a drop in the bucket at this point.
If the problem isn’t systemic then how do you explain the various studies showing that minorities are disproportionately “stopped and frisked”?
Just read the HN rules and comments dang makes when he moderates and you’ll see that HN is actually one of the most accepting online communities around if you can internalize the reason HN exists and what differentiates it from other discussion sites online.
Sorry the cops have more pressing concerns than obeying the law? Then they should not be police officers. A whole lot of cops seem to have a whole lot of other pressing concerns standing around watching George Floyd get murdered. A whole lot of cops seem to have a whole lot of other pressing concerns standing around watching Rodney King get beaten. There are hundreds of incidents of whole lot of cops seem to have a whole lot of other pressing concerns standing around watching their fellow officers assault prone or unresisting civilians.
Just so I understand, if you spent your whole life getting treated as a second class citizen and peaceful protest did not work, and voting did not work, and nothing changed, could you not see yourself getting a little tired of living a lesser life? Now imagine having kids and having to watch them live the same lesser life.
* Require police to be self-insured, backed by their pension plan
* Refactor qualified immunity for police work (no more carte blanche)
* Legalize all drugs (tax and regulate, treat abuse as a medical issue)
* Legalize and (and regulate the hell out of it) sex work
* National LEO database to prevent bad cops from moving one county over
* National guidelines and certification of police behavior
(a Geneva convention of sorts). No excuses of ignorance of the law
Thanks-- I didn't find that from the original link. But I don't really think it supports your argument.
It's pretty hard to identify a person from just the eyes, but to the extent that shows anything it seems to contradict the claim to me: the face on the left appears to me to have a much more prominent brow ridge compared to the face on the right-- like a shelf above his eyes on the left, while the right dips in near the nose.
As far as the officer's ex-wife saying 'that's my mask' -- the thread shows a bunch of other pictures of protesters with the same mask.
This also explains how they could investigate the claim quickly-- they only needed to identify the location of a single officer.
But as to the second part of your comment, the bad apples should be removed, but are not. So what do you do about it? Put videos of the internet maybe so it's more public?
Maybe you also go out and protest about it. Maybe that causes more videos to show up. Who knows.
I'm saying that cops telling you he didn't do it, seems like a questionable source to base your opinion on.
That they denied it is just additional (weak, sure) evidence.
Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Fox News hosts, and even Rush Limbaugh have all spoken out against the murder of George Floyd.
> “I hope these cops are dealt with good and hard,” Limbaugh said. “I’ve seen the video like everybody else, and it makes me so mad I can’t see straight.”
https://www.dailywire.com/news/limbaugh-george-floyd-death-m...
> "it was clearly police brutality and it was not conduct we expect of any officer," Cruz said.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/ted-cruz-on-floyds-death-riots...
Unfortunately, you are rarely the one who decides what is legal and what is not. I remember Edward Snowden mentioning this in some AMA on Reddit as one of the reasons why for a society it's a bad idea to strive for zero crime rates: After all, this most likely means that it's impossible to commit a crime and, thus, rebel against or, if need be, even overthrow the system.
Right now I could simply dress up as police officer and stage such a video. I'm not at all saying this is happening, I'm just saying it'd be possible to do that. With fake news as well claims of things being fake news being very common these days, we should all be a bit more careful and thorough.
Stop and Frisk disparity between Blacks and Whites
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/nyregion/nypd-social-dist...
https://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/new-evidence-r...
You noticed he never called White guys storming into state capital with guns “thugs”. Even after they basically forced the government to shut down out of fear.
I'm particularly interested in who funded and organized the media operations in countries like Germany or the UK.
We do know that Soros does that, but he's not the only one, so we can't possibly blame him for every single occurrence.
It's number 1 there right now. I typically use the /active site instead of the homepage as I mostly come here for the discussion sections anyway.
The https://news.ycombinator.com/lists page is generally a great resource for HN.
Which would make this better how exactly?
Some police acts enrage me, for sure. Really. At the same time, the rioter behavior we've seen in the last three days might be worse than the sum total of all of that. And I know that the police have to deal with this shit day in and day out. It's an impossible job, and yet we cannot survive without them.
Maybe someday we can have AI robot policemen instead, programmed to very careful protocols. I'm cautiously optimistic.
Whereas these "thugs" today doing all of the above aren't protestors, in fact I've heard many protestors speak out against them too, and they seem to include quite a lot of young white leftists just looking to cause trouble.
The remark you're referring to was specifically about looters, so I think it's a bit dishonest to compare that to a group of peaceful protestors.
I don't think you can blame Soros or Murdoch for that. That crime is in someone in the cop's chain of command - as well as each officer that decided not to call in sick yesterday.
> if you spent your whole life getting treated as a second class citizen and peaceful protest did not work, and voting did not work, and nothing changed, could you not see yourself getting a little tired of living a lesser life?
That describes me pretty well. Nonetheless, I obey the law. And I certainly don't beat people, especially when they're unconscious.
More evidence that Whites are less likely to get tickets for the same offense.
https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-racial-profiling...
If the government wasn’t afraid of the white protestors, why did they postponed re-opening? They specifically said that they didn’t reopen out of fear.
You noticed he never called the policemen “thugs” has he ever called a white criminal a thug or a “son of a bitch” like he called a football player peacefully protesting?
"United Airlines pilots are by in large good people. The vast majority of them know not to crash the plane."
You don't need legislation to do anyway, you just go ahead and do it using whatever means at your disposal. The legal repercussions come later, if at ll.
Less pithy answer: The protests, and the videos, are not examples of regular crimes or regular criminals. They're about criminal actions by police, two circles in a venn diagram that should never be crossed without black & yellow stripes and giant red "WARNING" text. It needs highlighting due to how much of an exceptional circumstance it should be.
Yes, normal people commit crimes and yes, those people should be punished harshly for them, but those normal people are not people put in positions of power over others by the state, which is why you don't see quite so many protests against them. (You do see protests about them, though: Zimmerman wasn't exactly seen in a positive light, for example.)
Asking "but what about regular Joe Criminal" in the face of protests about police is like a poor diversionary tactic. It's essentially just whataboutism.
The Movement for Black Lives objects to body cams: https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/end-the-war-on-black-peopl...
I don't remember all the details, but weren't the protestors calling for reopening? If the government postponed, they did so despite the protestors, not because of them.
> has he ever called a white criminal a thug
Many of the looters right now are white, so they'd be included in the group of criminals he recently called thugs.
> or a “son of a bitch” like he called a football player peacefully protesting?
Kaepernick got the same treatment as Trump's white Republican competitors in the 2016 primary. Trump is an asshole and he's never nice to people he disagrees with, regardless of race.
I thank the internet for making me aware of this.
Here are some other remarks Trump made along with "very fine people":
> we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence. It has no place in America.
> The driver of the car is a murderer. And what he did was a horrible, horrible, inexcusable thing.
> I think the driver of the car is a disgrace to himself, his family, and this country.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trump...
Once you accept something controversial can be done be highly in situation X, the fact you allow it in situation X eventually gets used as a point that it should be allowed in situation Y, where Y was the controversial thing in the first place.
There's no question in the ability of the police to abuse the civilian population, we see it every day. Punch a police and see what happens, and then if they punch you again watch what happens.
Stop assuming the worst of others as the default. Unless of course you're doing it in bad faith.
Excuse me, the armed Michigan protestors who stormed the state capital were “very good people”.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/01/politics/donald-trump-michiga...
A much better website would have contact information on it. And it would cite the original people that took the videos. And they could have asked those original people basic facts, such as the exact location and time of the recording.
I want my police to skillfully work on the crime problem, not carefully spend equal minutes on each demographic group.
I don't know if they were "very good people", but I haven't heard any reason to think otherwise.
And your own source makes it clear that the government wasn't intimidated by these peaceful protests:
> lawmakers were meeting to debate an end to the emergency order... Despite the pressure, Whitmer extended the order, which was due to expire at the end of Thursday.
Why not make the people really safe and reinstate Jim Crow and laws against interracial marriage?
I’m sure you wouldn’t feel the same way if you were constantly stopped because of the color of your skin. But we should just accept it.
This also explains why minority owned startups get a lot less VC funding than people who “pattern match” with Zuckerberg.
And you wonder why there are riots...
Btw, they were wrong.
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/08/the-data-can-no-longe...
But it turns out that the New York Daily News was wrong about its forecasts, which the media outlet’s editorial board wrote in an op-ed Monday that it was “delighted” to admit. Instead of bedlam up in Brooklyn and hell up in Harlem, as the paper had warned would happen as a result of scaling back “stop and frisk,” the opposite happened: “Post stop-and-frisk, the facts are clear,” wrote the editorial board Monday. “New York is safer while friction between the NYPD and the city’s minority communities has eased.
Police are not generally being shot at.
The situation you describe is not a violent one.
What I think would be a better situation is a much higher percentage of visibly armed protestors. You didn’t see police beating and attacking any of the armed protests last month, and there’s a reason for that that extends beyond their being mostly white people.
People like to condemn the previous protests for being armed, and for protesting for something that was dumb (reopening businesses during a pandemic), but the armed part will become more and more important for any meaningful protest in America, as we have now learned that if you aren’t, the police will just come and attack you with sticks or gas or cars or the threat of their own rifles.
People shouldn’t carry guns to shoot them, they should carry them to indicate to everyone around them that nobody wants a fight, which is generally the same reason police do.
Criminals don’t attack cops in groups because criminals know that if they do, 20 cops have weapons that will be used against them in seconds.
I would love to be able to say: “cops don’t attack protestors because cops know that if they do, 20 protestors have weapons that will be used against them in seconds”.
Here is what quality reporting looks like
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/31/21276044/police-violence-...
Yes, people. Sometimes reporting takes effort, and professionals can do a better job than inexperienced people.
The police in America are extremely well-armed, far better than the general public in most places. It poses a real danger, as we have seen playing out over the last few years.
Do you think 20 or 30 armed Black men could have gotten away with this?
https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2020/05/05/PDTF/5969fca5-...
Holding police to a higher standard makes sense. But with very large numbers, a high standard still requires expectation of a significant amount of outliers.
I'll just say that if 20 armed black men couldn't get away with protesting in Michigan, that says something very bad about the Democrats who run the state.
So I looked it up for my state: https://www.superlawyers.com/texas/article/stop-and-frisk-in...
Here it seems to be related almost entirely to traffic stops. I suspect, but don’t know, that racial identity would play a lesser role in that case because an officer wouldn’t likely known a driver’s race until the vehicle is already pulled over. To play devils advocate though I am white and had law enforcement ask to search my vehicle several times in my youth.
This is the second time I've heard this word this week (the first had to do with bicycle laws). As far as I can tell, the point seems to be to shame the target into turning off their brain. Hope this obnoxious neologism dies out soon. It's certainly a showstopper for rational conversation.
The problem, here, is not the word whataboutism, nor is that word a showstopper for rational conversation. The point is not to shame the target in any way. The point is to bring the conversation back to the original point: Instead of "but what about..", talk to the actual point.
Which, so far, you've absolutely refused to do. At no point have you addressed the original point you tried to make, that there is some need to compare police brutality to something else.
So, let me walk back the comment on 'whataboutism' and instead of using the shorthand ask you why should we give any consideration to the question "what about other criminals' while discussing police brutality?
It appears that you're unwilling to stand honestly behind your own statements, nor willing to engage with the substance of the statements others have made, but rather would prefer to be evasive.
I would absolutely love to be proven wrong, here, but sadly fully expect not to be.
And these are the types of excuses White people make to justify and to gloss over problems.
Here are similar statistics for Florida.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/new-evidence-r...
And GA.
https://www.wabe.org/study-3-ga-locations-black-latino-drive...
But you really think racial profiling only happens in one state.
It's only dangerous when you work under the assumption that the primary role of police is getting into altercations with people or doing things that require the potential for the immediate deployment of violence. The vast majority of police work doesn't require that.
Some small proportion of police should be armed so they can be called in for the exceptional case, but that's not necessary for most cops. The potential cost and messiness of any kind of use of physical force (armed or not) is usually far higher than the cost of what it's intended to remedy.
Foreign operations are carried out by a military, who define an enemy and set objectives to destroy them.
Policing is different. It’s a domestic affair where the objectives are to protect citizens and improve public safety.
It gets very dangerous when police begin operating like the military, define the citizens they’re suppose to protect as “the enemy”, and then set objectives to destroy them.
In my own school there was a bully who used to bully smaller kids together with his friend. Notice that he always needed his friend, and always needed the kid to be smaller.
Years later I saw him in cop uniform. My first reaction was WTF, but on second thought it made perfect sense.
https://scontent-lax3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/fr/cp0/e15/q65...
Branded as a terrorist organization so that use of extreme and possibly military force could be justified?
I can only speculate about what your exact argument is: I'm guessing that what you're saying is that, surely, today's police are behaving better than the police in, say, the civil rights movement era (I couldn't find any data on that but I'm willing to accept that much for the sake of argument). And I think you infer from that that police violence is downward trending and that therefore, we should just let matters run their course: any upset to the delicate improvement might plunge us in the other direction.
But your inference is incorrect. You're looking at a function over time, see that this function was (probably) higher at some point in the past than it is now, and conclude from that that the function is still trending downwards. Essentially your argument seems to be based on the entirely unjustified assumption that the function has to be monotonically decreasing.
But if you don't assume monotonicity (and you really shouldn't), then function values in the far past don't give you any information about the derivative of the function at t=now. And the derivative at t=now seems to be (ever so slightly) positive, not negative as you imply. In which case, evidently, things are not improving on their own.
You make the question uninteresting by its assumptions. You pose a hypothetical situation - a white cop killing a black man - which might be interpreted as a case of systemic racism, depending on the context of the killing. But then you impose the axiom that the hypothetical world in which the situation takes place is not racist. So the situation could not have been a symptom of systemic racism, by your definition, and any query about whether it was racist has only one answer, which directly follows from your given axiom.
So I'm left confused at why you pose the question.
Going forward, no video will be uploaded without first gathering this information and verifying the context of the video. Please say if you feel there is still information that needs to be added that can help.
Please let me know if you feel there is more information that could be added to help improve the site.
If you still think there's more information that could be added please say and I will make sure it is listed with each video
I agree with you completely that the rioter behaviour is appalling. I feel like I have seen just as bad as the things on this site from rioters and it deeply saddens me. I am confident however that those rioters that do stoop to the ultimate lows including attacking store owners will be punished to the full extent of the law.
Transparency is the only way to root out actual and suspected corruption. It’s not a cure but a required prerequisite.
I don't want to discuss that topic here as I am less able to rationally think when it comes to not only Christianity but religion as a whole.
What I can say is that a video was submitted last night of a man who was crawling to a police officer, following his orders, before being shot multiple times and killed. His name was Daniel Shaver. Please look it up and watch the video if you do not believe it is possible to make a judgement as to whether somebody has crossed a line.
I upvoted it. The police are making the situation worse and people need to know they are no longer the police who are their to protect them but the police who are abusing their power and worse than terrorists.
This issue is way more important than SpaceX launch.
It could mean we don’t have the next black Astronaut, or the next minority space engineer, or the next minority Elon Musk. Because a minor police encounter would have led to their death.
Many of the same people on HN want government involvement because their favorite app can’t be side loaded on an iOS device (a few apps) but excuse police brutality. How many submissions have been flagged on issues regarding police brutality on HN while submissions about an app that Apple wouldn’t allow make the front page?
It shows you where people’s priorities lie.
People sometimes feel like if a story isn't on HN's front page, that we, or the community, feel like it's unimportant. That's not it at all. Rather, importance is not the quality that organizes HN. If it were, HN would not exist. An entirely different website, or no website, would exist in its place.
The organizing principle of HN is intellectual curiosity [1]. Everything we do here derives from that [2]. In the case of a thread like this one, the question I have as a moderator (not as a human being or a citizen) is whether this community, in its particular manifestation in this thread, is able to have a thoughtful conversation in which curiosity is present, or whether it is not. We sometimes turn off user flags if the answer is yes, but not if the answer is no.
That doesn't necessarily have to do with the story itself being on-topic or off-topic for HN. A story like this (or rather the cluster of stories around George Floyd, the protests, the riots, and related topics like police violence) is too big to be called on-topic or off-topic. It depends on the particular submission and the particular thread. HN has had several major threads related to this story and I'm sure it will have more.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
See the “War on Drugs” in the “inner city” and “Treat Drugs like a Disease” when it affects “rural America”.
But those policemen probably weren’t wearing Black Lives Matter under their uniforms.....
I'm not saying these videos aren't showing an injustice and a misuse of force, I'm saying that making a fair conclusion is complicated and should be done by a complex process that you can't hope to do yourself. And if you simply aggregate videos of police using force and label them all as brutality, frankly you are abandoning the ideal of justice in the pursuit of it.
Your site should present these videos as acts that warrant investigation, not as a wall of shame for (assumed) guilty/bad cops (even though many of them are guilty/bad).
There is deep, systemic injustice in our society, and there are murders and brutalities taking place all too often, and this does demand action and attention. I applaud action to that effect and I honor that you are motivated by the pursuit of justice. But you need to recognize that it is a challenging task that requires a measure of elevated ethical discipline in order not to backfire or undermine itself. The principle of "innocent until proven guilty" is a core precept of a good justice system, but not one that your approach seems to embrace.
Edit: earlier this post linked to a data visualisation project, not a collection of videos.
Obviously the best thing to do is avoid fighting. However, if you’re going to be in a fight, it’s better to be armed than unarmed, if for no other reason than to encourage your opponent not to force a fight.
