Projects like this are what you can do.
It seems to me that the current set up excludes the vast majority of people (who are unlikely to know markdown, Git, or Github) which limits its effectiveness.
Maybe a good add-on project for someone is creating a website where potential new incidents can be submitted and evaluated, then pulled into the repo automatically if they pass muster.
So maybe look up videos of cops shooting journalists, smashing windows, bashing people in the face when they weren't doing anything, and running people over with their cars. There are literally hundreds of such videos from the past few days.
Then you'd be able to say you've seen videos of things other than white kids throwing bricks.
Many of my black friends don't like the idea that the protests are about COVID tensions (even if income inequality and unemployment obviously contribute). It's felt like an erasure of their struggle. I'm Hispanic and have been profiled a few times in my life. While I cannot pretend to know the full spectrum of the black experience in the US, I'm inclined to agree that I feel similar, too.
Edit: no clue why this keeps getting downvoted. The protests are (1) not only about COVID and (2) implying that they're only about COVID feels like erasure to Black (and Brown) people. Unless I'm missing something, here. Perhaps I need to be more detailed?
The entire point of this protest is to be heard. There is a population, long silenced, that has a message to convey. Today that message is BLM - and it is incredibly taxing to convey that message. To then look that movement in the eye and completely miss the message, returns us to square one: the problem of being unheard. That is what I mean by "a feeling of erasure."
The protests have been greatly enhanced and made far stronger by the ridiculous amount of police violence. Without that, and without the continued racist action of the Minneapolis police, DA, and even medical examiner.
Ferguson wasn't that long ago, and everything is worse since then. I'm not surprised that it's this big.
Here is the torrent hash if anyone wants to host it and seed:
9b85dd223c8f92c923f516ed77bbdfcb770f4dd8
> I vouched for this. In other threads, an attitude I've seen is "well I'm just a tech worker, what can I possibly do to help?"
I hope something like this is done for these protests (Anonymous?) and undertaken by the greater tech community as the Police need to be held accountable for the brutality and callous inhumane behaviour towards citizens and journalists alike, that many on here simply accepted 'as other people's problems.' And in many cities the police have simply decided of their own accord to just shut off their bodycams. I spent most of the weekend following the events and after you weed through the BS bots, you actually see the numbers are there to make it happen in just about every city. It's really just a matter of coordination and Will.
If nothing else this is a stark reminder of what your tax money is going towards, and it isn't going towards roads, schools or whatever absurd notion most use to justify the ever growing militarization and expansion of a Police State in the US.
The thing I don't get was that in the late 80s and 90s activism and tech/hacking oriented people were pretty much one and the same, namely Cypherpunks. Specifically in the Valley!
From https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/blob/master/repor...
If you look at the video though the guy was pushing towards the officer against the officer's hand. What do you expect to happen when you decide to aggress on an officer instead of back away?
Here's the video they link https://twitter.com/_doreenpt/status/1266994439039455232
How many other incidents are there in this repo that are unfairly listed/described?
Seriously? Given the choice between "many decades of racial animosity and unfair police conduct" and "it's the lockdown", you really made that choice?
Speaking as a brown person, I am seeing a lot of white people in masks burning down and looting the livelihoods of black and brown business owners. I think I remember having read about something like this having happened before in history.
edit: I just walked the video again. you have to be crazy if you don't think the guy was encroaching on the officer's space
If these riots had stayed isolated to Minneapolis you'd have a point.
Alot of those folks were co-opted… at least according to folks like Bill Blunden (belowgotham.com) and John Young (cryptome.org)
(Not to deny the sentiment or validity of the protests -- maybe in an ideal world, the protestors would have gone otherwise, but IRL, would have been tired, bogged down in work or school, or otherwise distracted with life. Which currently doesn't exist).
Those sorts of things make me cranky. I suspect other people might feel the same way. Especially seeing as it's only the latest in a string of deaths like this.
There was a video where a bunch of riot police were riding on the outside of an SUV. One fell off of it to the ground, got back up turned around and pepper sprayed behind him, even though there was no one behind him. There was no one moving towards him or even near him.
I don't understand how you can not have the equivalent of CRS/Bereitschaftspolizei.
This is all happening fast so I can't say this is the best source, but: https://www.courthousenews.com/minnesota-officials-link-arre...
Look at some of the efforts by this organization, who existed before Trump even was on the radar, to understand: https://www.joincampaignzero.org/#vision
https://streamable.com/kc5hwj - amazon truck stopped and looted
https://streamable.com/jmr7ez - liquor store looted
https://streamable.com/x8rb8h - another liquor store looted
https://streamable.com/2ka2cm - store manniquens looted
https://streamable.com/53l2qd - office looted and trashed
https://streamable.com/x3al2j - target looted 1
https://streamable.com/e706oz - target looted 2
https://streamable.com/d9t0au - target looted - 3
https://youtu.be/hF6mMCwc8GY?t=6961 [Embed] - target looted 4
https://streamable.com/m3n5ju - ohio statehouse broken into
https://streamable.com/z2ffvm - arsonist sets fire to himself (disturbing)
https://streamable.com/2wjxc0 - daytime looting
https://youtu.be/HUptzxyfpgQ?t=285 [Embed] - people pulling cars up to stores to load loot hauls
https://youtu.be/hF6mMCwc8GY?t=1944 [Embed] - drug store looted by mob https://youtu.be/hF6mMCwc8GY?t=4349 [Embed] - back of store looted out onto street
https://youtu.be/hF6mMCwc8GY?t=5077 [Embed] - store mobbed cop car smashed
https://imgur.com/BPPgQu9 - nations most revered science
fiction bookstore and priceless collection torched
https://streamable.com/6710vr - LA's favela like conditions post-riots
https://streamable.com/vqi0vm - minneapolis aftermath warzone
https://streamable.com/94c32c - minneapolis first night pandemonium
https://streamable.com/revv8g - sympathetic protesters get their windows smashed for no reason
How does anyone watch these scenes and perform the mental gymnastics required to believe all the rioting and looting was secretly done by white supremacists?
Git's UI will absolutely limit the contributing audience, I agree - Perhaps the author could add a simple form for people to submit through and then technical people could manually add them? Google Form/Jotform/Survey Monkey style?
Now putting myself in the shoes of the protesters: seeing the same destruction, destroying of properties, cars and businesses, I'll call it a day because this is no longer a protest. I'd go back home and wait for this to be taken care of and join a civilized protest once this has been taken care of. A civilized country should be able to hold a civilized protest. And having spent most of my life in eastern Europe, you can say I know a thing or two about protests. Last large protest I was a part of was in ~2013 irrc and the aftermath was very different. The night after each of those protests, everything was spotless clean, people thew all their garbage in the bins, nothing broken or destroyed. People were coming with their children and pets and being completely comfortable with it. There was a completely unrelated incident of a gas explosion at a Chinese restaurant, which burned a nearby shop. People gathered donations fo the shop owner to recover. Incidents with police? Practically none during ~3 months of daily protest. And we are talking eastern Europe - the police officers are anything but the nicest people on the planet.
[1] https://twitter.com/XruthxNthr/status/1266903223220097024
I think this is mostly wishful thinking, by people who are too horrified to admit that their tribe can be doing bad and so blame “outsiders”.
I wouldn’t so much call them white supremacists but anarchists.
The protests started out peaceful but became less peaceful when the police showed up and tear gassed innocent crowds. There's people literally getting arrested for practicing their right to assemble and right to freedom of speech.
I wonder how many have told a cop to go fuck themselves in the past 24 hours.
Judging by how quickly you were downvoted, I'm guessing quite a few.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-protests-...
I think the George Floyd killing is tied to C19 in it's extremity. To keep going like they did with vocal witnesses is very unusual.
The lockdown has affected both the police and public in a psychological way. We allowed ourselves to be locked up. At many levels our brains aren't happy.
Wearing masks has created change in protests and the way police act. It's anonymousing attackers and the attacked are also less human.
It's their job to remain calm and lawful under all circumstances.
They have the full force of state sanctioned violence at their disposal.
Watch some of the hundreds of videos on Twitter now and see if you can't see a rotten and brutal culture in US policing.
You want to see the protesters and officers as equal, but they’re not - the protesters are trying to change the status quo, the officers by and large want it to stay the way it is, and often want to make things worse for minorities (“Make America Great Again”).
Sympathy for the officers is fine, but remember they can quit whenever they want. Black people can’t quit being black.
On the first, I firmly believe that you should always deploy people who are accustomed to a more difficult or dangerous task. Managing large crowds of potentially violent people is far beyond the typical danger police face (usually peaceful, or one or two dangerous people). On the other hand, this is one of the scenarios the National Guard is trained for. And the level of force is likely lower than what they have trained for. The current response is like handingba Sev1 incident to an intern. They're just as or more likely to cause more damage as they are to help.
On the second point, handing armored vehicles and body armor to a group that isn't well versed in their use and effects on the opposing force is a bad idea. The outcome is inevitably the "five foot drop". When you your electronics don't work and you don't know how to fix them, people tend to give it a hard smack to see if that works. Likewise when your day to day policing doesn't work, deploying your heaviest armaments probably seems like a good idea.
I do still hold the officers accountable to a degree. The degree of force is incredibly one sided. However, more than them, I blame the system that put them in a situation they are so unequipped to handle.
So, before you get worked up about what happened, check the date, and try to see if there's any local news in the city that might indicate something might have changed in the meantime. You won't necessarily see these on frontpage headlines, so it might take a bit of digging. (I've found actual videos from local news reporting on the ground much more helpful than textual articles from national outlets here. It seems to me it's just too difficult to capture all the relevant dynamics, emotion, and nuance in text.)
In fact, if anyone's involved, I would suggest putting this information in the repo here as well. You don't want to add fuel onto a fire that was already under control a few days ago, and you want to know when (or whether) good progress is being made. Ultimately the goal is to find a working model that others can hopefully emulate.
For some people the primary social contact that is broken is long running systemic racism.
For some it's militarization of the police.
For some it's the US seemingly slowly sliding in facism
For some it's the economic Injustice of being told "the economy", i.e. the stock market is doing great while unemployment is at an all time high.
Etc
And this one is a general one about America's shit: https://github.com/mikeizbicki/american-shit (disclaimer: it's my repo)
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/law-enfo...
How true is all this? We'll likely never know, but it seems odd that the media and FBI seem to have very little interest in this very plausible scenario.
You are confusing the idea of collectivism (in which each individual is responsible for the welfare of the members of the group, and is expected to sacrifice to some extent—different variations on collectivism vary on the extent—their own welfare for the common good) with the concept of collective punishment (a widely recognized violation of human rights and, in the context of armed conflict, a war crime, in which members of a group are punished for mere shared membership in a group which contains wrongdoers, without any evidence of collaboration in or support for the wrongdoing.)
They are not equivalent.
This may be a topic of another discussion but I wouldn't call it a bad idea in a country where everyone and their dog has firearms, just saying...
I have said this elsewhere on HN, but I think these protests would be better for everyone if police simply did not show up. I think the video we are referencing is a great example why.
Were you saying the same things during the lockdown protests?
I highly recommend watching it even if you don't like or usually don't agree with him. He frames this as a row of dominoes and the societal contract that black people constantly see violated.
I provide these videos in hopes people will knock it off with the conspiracy theories about white people being the ones rioting and looting. Police brutality disproportionately affect black and brown people. So why is it wrong to think that it would be mainly black and brown people who would be angered and go on a rioting/looting spree to lash out against the oppressors?
It doesn't make sense to protest any more, in person, if you are helping looters destroy your local economy in an already bad recession by occupying an already taxed and outnumbered police force.
That said: it's increasingly evident that they're very poorly trained. You see the same strongman tactics in every city. They gang up on a single person, sometimes 4 or 5 of them, all hitting, all kicking, and continue to do this once you're on the ground. If you've ever watched Live PD, you see a ton of this same behavior, all the time, all across the country.
At the same time, there are some really bad cops out there (and the cynic in me tells me they're more common than we're lead on to believe), and also lots that just don't have the mental fortitude to do the work, but are still doing it anyway. Those people need to be weeded out, and we need to better equip them with tools that are not weapons.
As far as rational, controlled, and motivated anger goes, what day these events happen on should not stand in the way. This needs to be harnessed to enact massive structural change of course, not online flame wars or unproductive methods of protest. Still, that very anger you see is also able to be used to motivate many people to add in ways they may not have before. White people are starting to understand that they can be used as literal shields [1] against police brutality, and that should not be lost in this. There is much to be gained in a positive way from this anger.
I do appreciate your general sentiment here, I just wanted to underscore that the anger here, particularly that felt by POC, has deep roots beyond these incidents and can be used positively. I think that caveat is where we agree - how to harness that anger.
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EZJ5P_gWAAADwpQ.jpg https://twitter.com/michellebhasin/status/126747635543387750...
The Portland police bureau came out to the game locked and loaded, full riot gear, trucks modified to hold ten cops hanging on the outside, tear gas, flash bangs, pepper balls, rubber bullets, riot batons, helicopters, spotlights. And, they decide to starts gassing protesters half an hour before curfew begins...
Protests started loud but moderately peaceful; no thrown objects, no fires, no damaged buildings. Cops tear gas and shoot them for "obstructing traffic". After a few hours of this, the crowd starts throwing water bottles, breaking windows, hurling the tear gas grenades back. This back and forth goes on through Sunday night.
Portland mayor Ted Wheeler gets a LOT of flack from important people who spent their weekend coughing on tear gas and waking up to sirens, painful screaming, and flashbangs, instead of drinking fine wine at nice restaurants and walking the Pearl District. He tells the cops no more violent riot control measures.
Monday night hits, something like 10,000 protesters take the streets and bridges, organized, geared up with cones, leaf blowers, shields, gas masks, body armor. The cops stay put. They don't even come out of their staging area. Protesters spend the evening chanting, talking to passersby, and policing bald headed agent provacateurs wearing German camo to hide their swastika tats. It was beautiful, the air was breathable, and there were no reports of looting or damage.
The other entry in the social contract is that our leadership should work to keep the country safe, and it failed at the very top.
Does that help clear things up for you?
This strikes me as too simplistic solution. I tried to find papers on how demonstrations become riots, but my google.scholar-fu has failed. Anyone got good review papers on this? (If none exist, there is a goldmine there for social scientists.)
> Sympathy for the officers is fine, but remember they can quit whenever they want.
That's not always the case. As I said, often those people have to provide for someone and put food on the table each night. I know exactly what it is to be a kid and seeing an empty table in the evening.
No, it's not. Participation in a mass protest may be motivated by collectivist ideals, or it can be motivated by the individualist ideal that it is better to discourage a government course of action that could in the future be of grave danger to you individually, and that the immediate risk of participation in the protest is less than the long-term risk of the policy being protested against.
People of ideologized strictly and emphatically opposed to collectivism engage in mass protests.
> Collective punishment may be a violation of human right [...]
> what is your solution when [...] your task is to make sure that the city is still there the next morning?
The legitimate task of the police is to protect the rights of all (innocent, suspect, and even, except to the extent specifically and legitimately deprived due to their guilt, the guilty). There is no circumstances when participation in a gross abuse of human rights is within the scope of their legitimate task.
That's called projection, on your part.
I don't think anybody supporting the protesters is horrified that some of the "legitimate" protesters are looting. They're more horrified by the systematic abuse and lack of accountability that has sparked these protests.
Your insistence on focusing on the violence is a cheap distraction.
https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-a...
I see an umbrella put way over the fence. I see a policeman grab an umbrella that was way over fence. I see then someone else reach across the fence in response to the police grabbing the umbrella. I see the police then react to that person reaching across the fence.
I don't see blame. I just see tinder, a spark, and an escalation.
I'm fully 100% for "Black Lives Matter" and 100% against police brutality and the militarization of the police. But that video is too ambiguous convince all people. It's the same with the CNN reporter. People who want to see racism see a black reporter get arrested. People who don't want to see racism see 3 people getting arrested, one black, one white, one latino? Yes, racism exists but that video is also not proof of it.
First of all, it's two videos. Watch the aerial view in the immediate reply. (If you didn't see it, you can find it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/gv0ru3/this_is_the...)
> I see a policeman grab
You see an attempted robbery resulting in the destruction of someone's private property.
> I see then someone else reach
You see a person trying to hold onto their property as they're pulled over the fence because a cop just assaulted them.
> I see the police then react
You see the police immediately start spraying and bombing and gassing, with the flimsiest excuse, an entire crowd of people who are literally just chanting.
This coordinated initiation of violence is extremely typical from the police playbook. Watch this third video from 26:30 as the filmer explains the meaning of a "posture" change when the police swap in gasmask brutes in place of the bicycle cops who were standing there before, showing that they planned to escalate from the beginning. https://www.facebook.com/omarisal/videos/10220021035848747/
https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1266752393556918273
The thread was at 185ish at last count. It has been growing since he started it on May 30.
Why are you not applying the same logic to the police state? The police murdered George Floyd, so doesn't that imply the police are no longer innocent at this point? Why is only one side beholden to rights and responsibilities? At that point isn't it your obligation to stand up to a group becoming criminal?
In 1773, King George was upping taxes while not providing adequate representation. Colonists thought this was an abuse of power, so they robbed and looted a huge boat filled with tea, which set off events that led to the American Revolution. Look it up, I'm sure there's a wikipedia article or something, it's pretty famous event in history.
It was in its infancy but the internet did exist. Technically the "INTERNET" was around in the 1960's.
I don't doubt that in some cases, provocateurs and false flag actors exist, but there's definitely a not insubstantial amount of anarchist-leaning folks who are acting genuinely.
The important thing to consider, in my mind, is whether your attention should be focused on a relatively small amount of property damage and looting, or the many, many examples of physical violence against people committed by police. Property damage is almost always a distraction, and is often intentionally used as one.
Something like shared google doc would fit better.
Perhaps google docs, or other collaborative tools are actually able to scale to 30+ users? What is the largest google doc collaboration that you have seen work out?
Also be sure to include the ones that police are responsible for like this car that the Riverside Sherrif busted out for no reason: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_XERvsXvSU
Anecodtal evidence
> said Howard Graves, a research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center
Appeal to authority
Your "source" does not cite sources or factual data, just an observation from someone. Your post and that piece of the NYT article holds no water because of the logical fallacies.
That's not what CRS/Bereitschaftspolizei is though. I've only ever seen them running around entirely without protection or with shields to stop people doing dumb shit.
"Before you get angry about police brutality, remember context is important!" Are you serious?! Some people are talking to the police chief so you shouldn't be angry that they are blockading people on to a bridge. Or angry that they are driving SUVs into people. Or violently pushing people to the ground. And that's just the NYPD. A department where the commissioner was praising the department for their restrain, if that's restrain wait until they stop holding back.
Giving each other the chance to do the right thing? What are you talking about? What do the protesters need to do? Stop proetesting?
> So, before you get worked up about what happened, check the date, and try to see if there's any local news in the city that might indicate something might have changed in the meantime
> So, before you get worked up about what happened, check the date, and try to see if there's any local news in the city that might indicate something might have changed in the meantime. You won't necessarily see these on frontpage headlines, so it might take a bit of digging. (I've found actual videos from local news reporting on the ground much more helpful than textual articles from national outlets here. It seems to me it's just too difficult to capture all the relevant dynamics, emotion, and nuance in text.)
Are you nuts? So if it happened 3 days ago and the police are saying sorry but not laying charges, it's a-ok? There are no real nuances here. You have police shooting rubber bullets are people's faces, spraying them with pepper spray while they have their hands up, tear gassing people. All while not facing criminal charges.
> In fact, if anyone's involved, I would suggest putting this information in the repo here as well. You don't want to add fuel onto a fire that was already under control a few days ago, and you want to know when (or whether) good progress is being made. Ultimately the goal is to find a working model that others can hopefully emulate.
No, you want to add fuel to this fire if you want this problem to be solved. Working models can be found in nearly every civilised country in the world.
Stop telling people not to be angry and start being angry.
Why do protestors have to ensure some bad actors that try to hide amongst them don't take advantage of the situation? Causing destruction for a laugh is what the police is doing already.
Along with bringing in the heavy duty officers just moments before this happens, it's obvious that they just wanted an excuse to bring in their weapons
Adding emotive fuel will only cause more harm
If you'd like to be angry, at least please don't misquote me. The sentence you put quotes around is a modification of what I wrote, not a quote.
why? it's big brands and no-face corporate capitalists who profit from a rigged game who are losing from the looting. haven't you watched The Joker?
Why was Floyd pinned to the ground until he suffocated when all he supposedly did was use a fake $20 bill? (supposedly because innocent until proven guilty). Why did none of the other officers present step in? All of them are guilty IMO.
As a police officer, you need to keep your colleagues in check. The problem right now is that there's vast groups of policemen who have no qualms with using excessive violence, especially against PoC, and they protect each other. I suspect that goes up the chain of command all the way up. For one, the US President himself hasn't condemned the actions of the police, not in the Floyd case, not in any other case of police violence. And that makes them complicit.
My question though: Why are you interested in that information? Is there something you want to prove or emphasize?
And the other side hasn't de-escalated either, with the president deploying the military. Earlier you could at least hold the police using excessive force accountable - assuming they didn't hide their badge number, which some did. Now, there's faceless, badgeless (not even an indication what branch of the military they're from) soldiers stepping in.
The protesters demand change, not a few individuals being held accountable. For every Floyd that died, there's hundreds if not thousands more of unjust incidents.
It is absolutely incredible to see CNN right now, they make Fox seem like a news source. It is getting to to the Pravda level at this point.
You've provided the theory, but you didn't answer my practical question: you have 1000 people representing authority and 100,000 people crowd. Let's say 4% of that crowd is violent. That is still 4 times your capacity. All while a large number of the remaining 96k are shouting at you. Put yourself in the shoes of those 1000 and your task being "restore order". In which case, the ball is in the crowd's yard. As an outside spectator(and someone who literally grew up in the epicenter of daily protests as a child), what I'm seeing here is the recent South Park episode turning into a documentary.
It's really easy to quote laws and rules, but in the real world, they are not always applicable. And in the case of mass gatherings, they are hardly ever applicable. Are you seriously suggesting that you were never put in a position where your only course of action was to grossly break the rules? If so, I envy you, I really do. No one hates breaking the rules more than I do but on many occasions in life, I've had to. It doesn't have to do with how rules and laws are defined or implemented. It's simple math: you have two bricks and three holes to fill, otherwise your house will flood. It's the same story with the pandemic - no one wants lockdowns or businesses crashing but it's either that or the death of millions.
He was a cop for 38 years before becoming chief of Moline Acres, Mo: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/500839-retired-st-l...
This is what anti police hatred brewing in this country leads to. Gang violence. You embolden true criminals.
Well, isn't this the entire point. The police are killing innocent people. Protesters aren't killing anyone. Seems like even more of a reason to be angry.
I just think a degree of restraint is required to avoid innocent people getting hurt.
If I may ask, why is this one not on the front page? It seems to offer something significantly different that that older link which only links to an article indexing police brutality against journalists, while this is against all people. It appears to have enough upvotes to be on the front page - did some other part of the weighting system bump it off or is there a manual flag/bump on it?
Appreciate all your efforts here and hope that doesn't come off as confrontational or accusatory.
Acts of violence are _always_ wrong. I did however point out the police are not prosecuted in any meaningful systemic fashion.
I'm sorry, because this seems like a good project, and as a reader I approve. But as a moderator, the perspective is different—the quesiton is always, is there enough SNI (significant new information [3]) to support a significantly different discussion? in this case vis-à-vis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393914, which has been on the front page all day? The answer seems to be no, because the comments in this thread aren't about the specifics of the repository—they're just about the general topic of police brutality. In other words this thread just gets sucked into the stronger gravitational field of the more generic topic, which unfortunately is what happens to most posts that fly too close to a large hot planet (i.e. a hot ongoing thread).
All that said, I'm tempted to contradict myself ("very well then I contradict myself") and dump the other thread in favor of this one, because I can feel there's something interesting here. So how about a compromise: if someone still feels like this post is interesting after, say, two weeks have gone by, they can email hn@ycombinator.com and we can arrange a repost. I was originally going to say one week, but that's sort of on the cusp between now and the future. Two weeks is more on the future side.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
p.s. People who say "hope that doesn't come off as confrontational or accusatory" are the least of our worries :)
What security guard. I googled this since I haven't heard anything about it and it seems that it happened in Flint on the 6th of May before the protests and was about face masks and not police brutality. Or are you talking about a different murder? At first glance, this just seems like misinformation.
The looters are motivated by selfish greed and clearly have an affinity for the most expensive commodities ie. Nike, Apple, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Rolex. But they still aren't surgically striking - the picture you falsely paint.
Many are even dumb enough to indiscriminantly destroy their own local neighborhoods, targeting both small and large businesses.[1,2]
Now, why would any outside investor, or even a poor entrepreneur who lives in the area, invest in the area, knowing that this infantile us vs them, poor vs businesses is going to be dominant narrative and zeitgeist of that area's people?
Investors wont take the same chances again if they are unappreciatively and scornfully seen as "rich man building a starbucks where it doesn't belong."
The people from these areas claim they want prosperity but deface and burn down anything with a mediocrum of betterment. By process of elimination, they want a poor uninvested area. Their message rang loud and clear in the last week: do not build nice things because then you are a "no-face corporate capitalist."
[1] https://youtu.be/hkW4yasOBtY
[2] https://www.foxnews.com/us/looters-run-wild-in-bronx-as-vide...
I heard about this from the Tim Pool podcast. Possibly they simply used the protests as cover to do this.
If you're assuming good intentions on the part of that protestor then the umbrella being over the fence and in the face of an officer was just an accident of being too close the fence so that their umbrella ended up in the police officer's face. The result is the same, the protester is crossing the line like the "I'm not touching you" meme. The officer has an umbrella shoved in their face and they react.
https://www.slideshare.net/Matthewthig/4-11-am-im-not-touchi...
From the officer's POV this (https://pasteboard.co/Jbm1UXn.jpg) is a protester trying to intentionally block their view or just annoy them.
I know you won't accept that interpretation as remotely valid because you've already decided there is only one correct way to see it.
I'm not placing blame and I'm not defending the police. I'm just pointing out your interpretation of what happened is just that, an interpretation. There is at least one other perfectly valid interpretation.
When I see people see double-quotes following a block quote, they're there to indicate that the following sentence(s) is about that specific portion of the larger quote... not to indicate deliberate misquotes.
In any case... every alteration he made to that quote resulted in a substantive difference to the thoughts and tone of my message. Including the sarcastic exclamation point he took the liberty to insert at the end. Maybe on a good day I'd have the energy to entertain it, but with everything being draining enough as is, I just don't have enough time or energy to reply to something that makes a mockery of something I'm already shedding tears on.
https://twitter.com/EDDIFUL/status/1267338642617364481?s=20
1) The simple police brutality
2) Kid grabs policeman, policeman reacts
You can see the kid reach for the officer. The officer reacted. Whether it was actually a threat I have no idea. The officer is trying to pass. The kid effectively corners him into a wall, intentionally or not, and then reaches toward the officer. Maybe it was supposed to be a friendly tap on the upper arm but in the middle of such a situation it's not hard to believe whatever the kid reached for felt like a threat to the officer.
Again I'm not trying to defend the police but if you want people to come together, if you want that 1/2 of the nation that's on the wrong side to support your cause, then you need less ambiguous examples. Otherwise it's just easy to dismiss it.
Other than taking the kid down there is no visible brutality in that video.
Edit, are you also insinuating that's the only 'rioting' they did and then magically the USA just formed out of nothing?
> Oakland police, who are assisting the FBI in the investigation, tweeted a statement Friday night saying the shooting appeared to be unrelated to the protest over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
So the police don't think it's related?
Focusing it on one single act tries to negate the point. It's not just a single act. It's multiple acts, on a daily basis. The police are arresting journalists live on air. For failing to obey commands that weren't given. They shot at other journalists on air. If that's what they're doing on the air.
There is no dispute in police brutality, the police do not deny it, the protesters do not deny it. So why would the truth lie in between an agreed-upon truth?
> The eighth night of protests saw less violence, fewer police clashes and more acts of civil disobedience.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/03/us/us-protests-wednesday-geor...
> Getting angry could cause more innocent people to get killed. Some are working towards a better future in these protests. Others are just getting inflamed and doing things they might regret. Adding emotive fuel will only cause more harm
...to which, you called for more anger and adding fuel to the fire.
As I’ve already identified above, the two extreme forces are the violent law enforcers who abuse their power and the arsonist protestors who are looting and vandalizing businesses as some kind of retribution. Both extremists are unjustifiable. It’s good they don’t represent the majority. It’d also be good if we were to not let them represent the agency ... and, frankly, to have control over our prejudices and our anger.
That's the equivalent of blaming any European for the Holocaust or any Muslim for terrorist attacks or any eastern European for car thefts or any other stereotype you can think of. I mean isn't this what the whole thing is about? Abolishing stereotypes? I'm all up for that, but trying to abolish something by actively using it seems really counter-productive to say the least.
As I previously said, I've had encounters with horrid police officers, regardless of my polite manners. But I'm also aware policemen are people with the exact same problem like any of us. I see something deeply hypocritical in the whole situation(and the many similar situations across the world over the years). Truth be told I only know one police officer personally. And the truth is he is one of the kindest people I have ever met, despite being utterly strict in his work. Now given the opportunity to choose between rocks flying his way and people calling him a dirty pig or playing with his 2 year old granddaughter in the evenings, which one do you think he'd rather pick?
Is there a way for a civilian to get access to the officer’s body camera recording and identify which cops are the trigger happy ones.
Basically a more targeted list that says “These officers violated the first amendment constitutional rights of citizens to peacefully assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances, this is the proof, please file charges”.
We are protesting because the police are unaccountable for their actions. How do we move to a place where we can hold them accountable and there is a quick as fair process for justice to be served.
This is HN. You don't need to project motivations on people when pedantry is sufficient.
(Your Armani analogy doesn't work however - a better analogy would be destroying property owned by, say, Halliburton.)
My current mental model is that rioring both needs a reactant, but also a catalyst. Imo there was plenty of reactant sitting the lockdown protests, but no catalyst.
My thinking on the matter will likely change as I learn more.
And to answer your question literally: no, I wasn't really thinking about riots then
You're doing a great job of it anyway trying to justify marching in brutes covered head to toe in armor all prepared for a gas attack and then mysteriously "reacting" to an _umbrella_ a minute later by bombing a crowd of people standing around chanting.
You're doing some heavy concern trolling here. I see you.
> The kid effectively corners him into a wall
If I push between you and the wall, you have not cornered me into the wall. The person who pushes in is responsible for being there.
> Whether it was actually a threat I have no idea
Kid has a phone in one hand and sunglasses in the other. If you have no idea then you're intentionally not paying attention.
> Other than taking the kid down there is no visible brutality
Other than the visible brutality, there is no visible brutality. Well, by _that_ definition...
These failures to understand basic economics are frightening.
Three cops watched him do it, and didn't give a shit. That represents the entire police department.
I don't know who those people are, nor have I taken the time to analyze their work. But let's assume that some were co-opted, you do realize that ultimately it doesn't matter because the few that weren't are responsible for some of the greatest innovation in citizen's use of cryptography and a non-state issue currency, those being: Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, Adam Back, Timothy May.
Hell, these people inspired a certain loud mouth Cyberpunk who went on to create wikileaks, and tried to expose covert Nuclear armament by the US prior to that, you may have heard of him as he's currently being used as political football in an extradition case: Julian Assange. And he motivated a guy who went to to work on TOR (Jacob Applebaum) and a former NSA contractor that revealed the extensive abuses of the the Intelligence Agencies around the world (Edward Snowden).
What I'm getting at is that these kind of movements are useful precisely because they do not rely on a single entity or person to steer the actions of said movement.
On the topic of armored vehicles, I vehemently disagree with distributing them to police forces. If there is a significant threat of a firefight, we have an existing domestic force that is trained to handle combat conditions. They are the National Guard. If things escalate to that point, the proper response is to call in the National Guard. They are both trained to handle that situation, and they have far more equipment than you could ever hope for. The National Guard has actual tanks, if it comes to that.
I will grant you, there is a very narrow middle ground of things that SWAT is equipped to handle but the National Guard would take too long to deploy. However I would contend that the military attitude SWAT-style tactics cause costs more in human lives than the small subsection of things SWAT needs to handle before the National Guard arrives.
The police should be a domestic force, charged with maintaining law and order among largely non-violent and lawful citizenry. The National Guard should be a force charged with handling violent and unlawful situations.
Traffic stops are well within the police jurisdiction. Standouts can be handled by police, so long as they don't plan on going in to the building. Taking a building full of hostile combatants with at-risk civilians should be handled by the National Guard. If the police feel at risk enough that they need more than a handgun, they should call the National Guard.
The police are not an invading army performing an occupation of hostile lands. They are public servants enforcing democratically chosen laws on a largely willing populace, of which they are part. Anything outside that scope should be handled by another branch that has been chosen and trained for that purpose.
I don't disagree, I'm just not as surprised as you are that things have changed from the 80/90's… the stakes are higher… and the name of the game is "dealing with the metadata killchain", building it, or both ;)
There is no brutality in that video. The officers wraps his arm around the kid and pulls him to the ground slowly and safely. There is no evidence in that video the kid got a single scratch or bruise. If there is evidence of actual violence it's not in that video.
There are videos of actual violence.
https://twitter.com/vantaepedia/status/1266055700515520512
no need to use the ambiguous videos that don't actually help change minds but only preach to the choir.
Black Lives Matter!
Putting someone into a headlock and dragging them around by their neck when that person had not initiated violence is brutality. And that person clearly did not initiate violence.
> The officers wraps his arm around the kid
Sure, a gentle loving caress around the neck, and then a gentle loving pull by the neck, and then gently and lovingly putting him to the ground by the neck.
> There are videos of actual violence.
Both are videos of actual violence. Thank you for sharing that one.
There is no intent to hurt, damage, or kill that kid and there is no evidence in the video of the cop on a bicycle taking down the kid that the kid was remotely hurt. Unlike other videos. So no, it is not actual violence.
And, no I'm not getting hung up on the word "intent". I'm pointing out if there is no actual hurt or damage then it's not violence.
As for the kids intent or the officer's perceived intent we'll never know unless the officer has a body cam and even if we did different people will likely see it differently just like the umbrella above. You see an innocent girl with an umbrella. Others see a girl intentionally putting her umbrella in the face of an officer and blocking his view effectively obstructing an officer. When he takes the umbrella clearly in his face people react and things escalate.
In any case you, and all the other downvoters, seemed to miss the entire point of my comments.
The point is there are multiple ways to see those videos. You claiming there is only one is about as relevant as telling someone their feelings are wrong. You can't tell someone else how they feel and you can't tell someone else what they see in those videos. If you showed those videos to 100 people and found that 50% (or even 20%) saw something different your rage that they didn't see the exact same thing you saw would not help you convince them they're wrong. If instead you understand those videos are actually not strong proof of your case you'd drop them for videos that are and therefore make your case better and help bring about the change you (and me) want to see.
Because the people we're told are responsible for such things (the police, and the media who are supposed to keep them honest) are not doing that job.
That's the very point people are speculating about.
