If you want to fan the flames, though, add a section for protesters savagely kicking unconscious victims in the head.
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.
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.
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.
Sadly, judging by the videos that's an overwhelming majority of the police force
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...
* 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?
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.
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.
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
The officer in question has been fired, arrested, and charged. That would seem to contradict the "never held accountable".
If you find yourself in a riot, leave. Common sense and common decency, no?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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...
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...
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.
I want my police to skillfully work on the crime problem, not carefully spend equal minutes on each demographic group.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.