I'm assuming that ACLU isn't claiming to be the injured party in suits like this current one. Are they acting as attorneys for one of the alleged victims?
[0] https://twitter.com/JaredGoyette/status/1265786797650558976
[1] https://twitter.com/JaredGoyette/status/1266115234420400129
[2] https://twitter.com/JaredGoyette/status/1265779746153078793
Press is a thing people do, not a credential people have. All people should have freedom to observe and report on (to the extent they wish or do not wish to) actions of the state. Restricting that should have severe punishment.
The reason they have special protection is because the constitution grants them special protection. The question of who is "the press" in this day and age where anyone can publish anything is certainly up for debate though.
It's almost entirely symbolic.
We already have tons of statutes for all sorts of assault/battery with modifiers if they are done using lethal weapons.
Police have already been demanding that "hate crime" laws (which are historically limited to who you are, not your profession or your choices) be amended for extra harsh punishment for attacks on police officers (despite many other existing statutes with similar purposes).
In the end, prosecutions of police with harsher statutes don't matter unless the conviction rate goes up. Right now, convictions of officers for actions done while in uniform are astronomically low. We need to work the other parts of the problem (gathering evidence, getting police to stand witness against other police, getting DAs to actually charge and push for convictions, firing of officers for conduct unbecoming an officer, etc).
This is not such a case and ACLU are not such attorneys.
Ranking victims by status is a dangerous game.
I'm not a lawyer, but it doesn't
> There is no precedent supporting laws that attempt to distinguish between corporations which are deemed to be exempt as media corporations and those which are not. We have consistently rejected the proposition that the institutional press has any constitutional privilege beyond that of other speakers.
Supreme court in citizen's united, internal quotation marks omitted. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf
> protections of the First Amendment do not turn on whether the defendant was a trained journalist, formally affiliated with traditional news entities, engaged in conflict-of-interest disclosure, went beyond just assembling others' writings, or tried to get both sides of a story.
9th circuit in Obsidian Finance Group, LLC v. Cox http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2014/01/17/12...
interfering with the evidence of, or the report of a crime? for the purpose of evasion of prosecution? tampering with a witness?
What you’re saying is a real issue in general, but not relevant to class actions as used as a civil rights tactic by ACLU.
What do you _mean_ that's not included in the parent post? What else do you think the parent is saying if not exactly that?
In MN the Minneapolis city council wants to disband the police department entirely. This may be all talk, and I'm not sure if it's technically possible, but what happens if there is no police department? What are the second and third order effects of that? Is having no law enforcement a better outcome for the residents? My initial reaction is "no".
When confronted with videos of people rioting, looting and vandalising most respond that "it's only a few bad apples, the vast majority are peaceful". Is it not true that most cops are OK too? I'm honestly asking. Yes there are some problem cops - Chauvin obviously having a long history of issues. But are we really saying that the majority of cops are bad actors? It feels like with emotions so hot right now, people are willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I am skeptical that is the right course of action.
If we follow the logic of making punishments harsher (say, adding years of prison to a violent cop), what then do we as a society expect is supposed to happen when said cop finally attempts to reintegrate into society after doing their prison sentence? We can't keep "wishing away bad guys" as if real life was a movie that conveniently ends at a happy ending.
If anything, a revamp of the current system needs to _do away_ with special protections and other dis-equalizer factors.
For the matter of police violence specifically, I feel that the courts are not even the best medium for change. For example, why is the topic of police training largely absent in these discussions?
The goal is to wipe the slate clean and rebuild from the foundation.
It seems that the Minneapolis police department has had excessive force issues for years. That feels like a leadership failure to me. In that case you'd look at the Chief, the union rep, the Mayor and any other folks who can change the culture but don't.
"The Camden County Police Department rehired most of the laid-off cops, along with nearly 100 other officers, but at much lower salaries and with fewer benefits than they had received from the city."
So the solution was to keep most of the cops (which I agree with) and then pay them less (which I, umm... I mean... that doesn't seem like a recipe for success but eh).
From that article it sounds like it's too early to tell if it worked. Is the new police force doing better than the old one?
And there's effects on the wider system - courts will believe a police officer's account of what happened pretty much no matter the opposing evidence. There's no accountability when a police officer goes against the reasons they were hired, and destroys people's lives.
There's the possibility of alternative systems of protection and justice, which don't create organisations which are incentivised to protect murderers, abusers, and rapists.
You know the protests are in all 50 states. Some of the flare-ups are due to responses to pent-up frustration from covid, but a lot are due to police riots/escalation. The rest of the protests are peaceful.
> But what are the second and third order effects of underfunded police departments?
Police departments, for many reasons, are the most over-funded [1]. NYPD went on strike and crime actually went down [2] for the month they didn't police.
The goal is not to "disband" but essentially rewrite the entire purpose of the department. Essentially put the policing function in receivership to be revived with new leadership.
[1] https://theappeal.org/spending-billions-on-policing-then-mil...
[2] https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...
In pre-body cam days Seattle PD got caught video taping protests or demonstrations. The current policy prevents that.
Thus, Seattle cops generally have their cams turned off while dealing with demonstrations or protests.
And simply meeting people's needs deters a lot of crime - nobody's going to wind up in a position where they're robbing a gas station if they know, from an early age, that they're going to be sheltered, well fed, and have a good life, and this isn't dependent on massive amounts of luck, and if they fuck up there's another chance.
The problem is that they are dramatically limited in the types of charges they can press against officers of the law (charges that carry big penalties, and have a very high burden of proof). This is anachronistically because we as a society have decided that officers deserve benefit of the doubt in the lack of compelling evidence. These days, many instances of misconduct are recorded, and the rules should change.
In Eric Garner's case, for example, the govt attorneys declined to press charges, because they lacked sufficient evidence that the officer was knowingly violating the rights of Eric Garner. The burden of proof for any kind of misconduct charge is currently so high, that even an egregious misconduct case like this passes by untouched.
If the attorneys general had a wider range of misconduct charges in their arsenal, they could raise the average cost of police misconduct, and it might improve the situation.
[1] recently informed by https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/pushkin-industries/deep-bac...
The public notion of good policing and the actual practices police departments follow have been diverging for several decades (if they ever converged). What we're seeing right now is not some inexplicable increase in bad behavior or cops deliberately targeting journalists. For modern American police this is just business as usual, except the volume of deployment is significantly higher than in the past few decades and the visibility is much higher as well.
Edit:
There is a flip side to this coin. When you have a systemic problem of this scale, you should be cautious about making simplistic (especially moral) judgements about individuals in the system. When someone's training, incentives, position in the community and even equipment nudge them towards bad actions, even decent people will routinely do bad things.
Social media platforms, take note!
This is why people donate to the ACLU. So that they can do the extensive work, pay lawyers, etc.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibilla/2020/06/03/new-bill... (direct source at https://twitter.com/justinamash/status/1267267244029083648)
I'd be interested to know to what extent it is that the police have simply internalized Trump's media antipathy. Perhaps the insane self-destructiveness of his time in office is leaking...
Obviously lame excuse by the PD as the delete button can do the same.
As a meta note, I've noticed that people often respond to comments saying "I'm shocked with a recent occurrence of X" with "X has always been bad and been happening for a long time" and in my opinion that response only serves to desensitize people to the bad thing.
> self-referential post-modernist bullshit
Umm, what? What contaminations exactly are you thinking about? I just can't place self-referentiality into this topic. Are you suggesting there is a comparable analysis that does include self-referential motifs? Also, why is self-referentiality or postmodernism bullshit?
This was all going on from day one of the reportedly "peaceful" protests. I've watched multiple anchors on CNN and MSNBC discuss "peaceful" protests against backdrops of live rioting/burning/looting.
The police need some degree of reformation but journalists chose a side at least as early as 2016. This is what happens when activist journalism is completely normalized. Police are humans too. You can only expect them to take so much targeted abuse before they target those who are amplifying threatening voices.
What are the common refrain on every single stream after the sun goes down? "FUCK 12". People openly threatening to murder police. All night long. These are the people journalists are defending. These are the agitators that the police have to deal with. Where are news reports of protesters throwing rocks at riot police? Multiple incidents of people throwing artillery shells (fireworks) into police crowds?
You shouldn't trust the media any more than you trust the current administration.
Lobster brain claims another. I have to say that one of the most overlooked forms of anti-intellectualism in modern life is the immediate discount of anything that uses even remotely complex terminology or looks in the general direction of critical theory.
judge for yourself - the 3 randomly selected cops from Minneapolis PD were clearly aware of what was happening and were just watching as business as usual when a sadistic psychopath (just watch the video and listen to the Chauvin's tone of voice for example) was slowly and torturously executing a human being. What those 3 tell you about the cops en masse?
>a long history of issues
It is pretty typical - while many cops would usually not commit severe abuse/crimes/etc. at their own will, they would do nothing to stop, prevent, help to prosecute the "bad apples" cops. Basically it is a police union's, the Fraternal Order of Police's, version of omerta. And that makes them at least accessories to all those crimes.
As with the Floyd case, for every murder by police there are three officers standing by watching and doing nothing, at best.
The examples to watch are Camden NJ and the RUC -> PSNI transition.
Yeah, I agree 100%, and this is why the "few bad apples" angle falls apart. This is a widespread problem with the culture of many police departments. It's not enough to fire the murderers themselves, we also need to ask:
- Who hired them?
- Who trained them?
- Who supervised them?
- Who looked into the previous excessive force complaints and decided they weren't a problem?
That is why if you want to highlight who is holding the real power and address the issues of inequality, the best place to start is to attack the police directly. Because it’s something that they are structurally unable to fix without fixing a whole bunch of other stuff first, and it places the focus right in the center of where the violence is coming from. It forces a confrontation by making a demand that they cannot ignore but also cannot actually address.
The Norther Ireland article specifically covers a few of the reasons why this works.
Edit: I realized that I didn't respond to your question of whether this demonstrates an improvement in Camden. Citylab seems to think so, but offers a nuanced explanation of why this may not be the case and what other factors are at play [3]
[1] https://www.sipri.org/commentary/topical-backgrounder/2019/p... [2]https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/siezing-mom... [3] https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/01/what-happened-to-crim...
Now they're suing to take back that lost freedom. If they don't, then what's to stop this continuing to be the norm?
I can't think of a clearer example of what the ACLU exists to do.
And conveniently, you don't know if you'll be under investigation or accused of a crime until it's too late to turn the camera on.
Sorry, that excuse doesn't fly. This concern should be addressed by controlling the custody of the footage, not by preventing it from being captured in the first place. In reality, body cameras protect good cops.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/29/politics/tim-walz-minnesota-c...
The police are bound by laws. Attacking them is not helpful. If the police are bad, the laws are bad, and/or not being enforced. The history of mandatory sentancing laws (funny enough brought forward by none other than Joe Biden) might as well be the soundtrack for police racism over the last 20 years.
"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." -- Stainslaw Jerzy Lec
If we assume there is such thing as human free will (your quote shrinks the possibility of what we can affect with our free will), Police officers are agents who have the ability to see these environmental factors and {choose to stay officers, ignore employer-provided therapy, vote for the union leadership which negotiates their employment contract, etc.}.
We don't have as much control over our lives as we would want, but police (as individuals and as a voting bloc) have significantly more control over the lives of others than us non-police do.
Parent post did not mention qualified immunity it doesnt seem.
> Right now, convictions of officers for actions done while in uniform are astronomically low. We need to work the other parts of the problem (gathering evidence, getting police to stand witness against other police, getting DAs to actually charge and push for convictions, firing of officers for conduct unbecoming an officer, etc).
it didnt say the low rate was due to qualified immunity
https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-te...
Edit: Please see HN comment guidelines.
A CNN reporter and crew have been arrested live on air while covering the Minneapolis protests over the killing of George Floyd.
Black correspondent Omar Jimenez had just shown a protester being arrested when about half a dozen white police officers surrounded him.
Mr Jimenez told the Minnesota State Patrol officers: “We can move back to where you like”, before explaining that he and his crew were members of the press, adding: “We’re getting out of your way.”
The journalist was handcuffed and led away alongside a producer and camera operator for CNN.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIClA57jWmQ&t=138s
accompanying story from same publication's site:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cnn-report...
The police and police wives in my family were already very cynical of journalists way back before Trump got roasted at the White House Correspondent's Dinner.
Every journo article that criticizes the work of an officer, a criminal case of the department, or any slight of the honor/reverence that Blue Liners have for the profession / individual LEOs is taken very seriously. The irony is that the journos can't publish accurate information without sources and police and their families don't/won't/can't be sources which would make their stories more accurate.
In the end, you get a media outlet either echoing the statement of the PR department of the Police or you get an investigative reporter doing the actual "checks and balances" role of the media. I just think police culture (and the legal/employment restrictions placed on officers) can't be comfortable with freedom of the press.
"20 minutes before the video you saw, police announced that the protest was closed and declared an unlawful assembly for the purposes of public safety. All people remaining after that warning were in violation of the law and the officers followed their instructions to clear the area."
"There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state. The other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people." - Commander Adams (Battlestar Galactica)
Obviously, this doesn't directly address the militarization of the police, but it should be easy to see how it can go both ways. Outfit the police as a military unit, and they'll start acting like one. How much surplus military equipment was sold to police since the Iraq war?
That screams of "I'm trying to figure out a way to arrest you, but I can't think of a reason. I'm going to do it anyway." Police should not be arresting journalists (or citizens!) for no reason. Being released quickly doesn't suddenly make the original act okay. It just makes it so it doesn't get worse.
Ending qualified immunity doesn't do anything to help the application of criminal penalties against police who violate the law, it only restores the civil liability for those actions.
"Critical theory" isn't even a thing and barely even intersects with post-modernism, although I suppose it shares some philosophical leanings. It's just a repackaging of Marxist ideals applied to other demographic groupings besides class, and it's just as easily disproven.
Edit: Thanks to whoever downvoted me, because they had nothing worthwhile to say in response. Rejection of objective truth is a core principle of post-modernism, you can ask the post-modernists yourself if you like, they'll agree. Meanwhile speaking the truth earns you hate since the rise of post-modernism.
If we believe the journalists that they were legally in the area, and the police either knew this or at least didn't have probable cause to support that they weren't legally in the area, I don't see how both of the above crimes were not committed.
The ACLU says, "There is a long history of law enforcement compiling dossiers on peaceful activists exercising their First Amendment rights in public marches and protests, and using cameras to send an intimidating message to such protesters: “we are WATCHING YOU and will REMEMBER your presence at this event.”"
I don't remember anything like that happening, at least not recently. Do you? The FBI behaved that way towards MLK, certainly, but it didn't have anything to do with body cameras.
In any case, I haven't argued, and won't argue, that police officers, or even the department itself, should have access to the footage except when necessary to defend themselves. Ideally it would be encrypted with a key held by an oversight board with substantial civilian representation.
That's not true at all. Media coverage of law enforcement matters is filled with quotes, anonymous and named, from the police community. That's not less true right now.
There's nothing stopping these people from talking to the press. Like anyone with an opinion, they're happy to do it for the most part.
By next week this will be pushed out of the news. By November it will be completely forgotten, except among the minority who it directly affects and were already aware. All of the outrage you hear now will not translate into change.
So when people say "X has been bad for a long time", people need to hear that as "and this time you should remember it and do something".
There's a lot of hubub about qualified immunity these days, but it only shields individuals from individual civil responsibility, it does not shield organizations from organizational responsibility for the actions of individuals under their employ.
Chances are, parties would sue the organization anyway, as the individuals are unlikely to be able to pay significant damages.
>can't be comfortable with freedom of the press.
I can see that - but equally, while each institution has an extreme pole it pulls towards, there are usually a few cooler heads who keep everybody grounded. Beating up journalists is an inherently self-destructive thing to do, no matter what you feel about them - ultimately, they have power, and if you beat them up, they're going to hold a grudge.
Perhaps the thing that Trump is really doing is demonstrating that, for whatever reason, normal rules no longer apply. You can build a wall in the desert. You can threaten people with real nuclear weapons on twitter. You can hit that jerk journalist who thinks he's smarter than you.
Anyhow, it's very strange. If I was in the US, I'd definitely be trying to diversify out of the country. Norms are what make a civilization. When they start getting broken from the top down, anything can happen.
Both?
I don't believe anyone was asked do pick. It's a false dichotomy.
> Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Press implies covering events and publishing about them. If that's not convincing enough, they spell it out in right to assemble, anyways. A press corps can assemble to cover events.
And writing for the 10-30% of people who think that incentives matter more than innate character - we don't need people to be sensitised and spring loaded to be shocked. These growth of these problems has been a visible trend for my entire lifetime and longer if you buy arguments like those presented in, say, The Rise of the Warrior Cop.
Anyone who gets shocked by trends that have been around for that long is either very new to this, or part of the problem. The solution is less shock, more reform to promote basic principles of equality, freedom and prosperity.
I don't think it implies that covering events has some kind of immunity. It's still subject to any general restriction on the assembly. The government can impose restrictions on the time, place, and manner of peaceful assembly, provided that constitutional safeguards are met. See https://www.loc.gov/law/help/peaceful-assembly/us.php
I don't know if the ACLU does that, but literally every other charity I've ever given to has, and I value my data more than that.
I didn't name check it, but if you check my post history there's a reason I didn't call for an outright repeal of QI -- I don't yet know what the effect of that would be or what measures might replace it.
I'm all for removing QI (and outlawing indemnification of LEOs in employment contracts) and replacing QI with something like professional insurance, but from my understanding the problem isn't that "QI prevents cases from being brought to court", but that DAs don't actually bring cases to court which could beat the QI standard.
Also, in my understanding, QI is simply protection against civil actions, not criminal prosecution. To repeat - I think the core problem is more that DAs don't bring the cases, not that the law is insurmountably high.
If more police were tried in criminal cases, that would make it far easier to build evidence for a civil case which could overcome the QI standard. OJ Simpson was acquitted in the murder trial, but lost his entire wealth in the subsequent civil trial to his in-laws.
The police forces are managed by elected officials, who are elected by taxpayers. These politicians should be held to account by voters for either their lack of leadership on police abuse of force (my preference) or their lack of fiscal responsibility in allowing police abuse of force to continue, accruing large legal bills and settlements (and increased liability insurance costs, presumably).
[Edit: This argument is a lot weaker than I thought it was because it's not entirely clear that the message I claim was communicated to the police was actually successfully communicated. See the replies/video below] Specifically I certainly don't believe that the journalists actually committed a crime if they had instructions from another cop that they could stand there. Those instructions would tend to negate any general order, and even if it didn't legally negate the order it would constitute entrapment and functionally negate it anyways. As a result I don't believe the police would think they had probable cause after they heard the camera crew claim they had received that instruction (and amusingly this is regardless of whether or not the camera crew had actually received the instruction they claimed to have received - to make it false arrest/kidnapping it suffices to be a probable enough claim that the police no longer believe they have probable cause).
A secondary weaker argument is that the governors order excluded the press from the curfew so even if the police had issued an order which included the press that order was illegal as applied to the press, and as a result they had no probable cause to arrest the press. It's weaker because to show they committed a crime under this theory I suspect (without checking Minnesota's statutes) you'd have to show they were aware of the contents of the governors order.
IANAL/I am not aware of the details of Minnesota's statutes - obviously details of the statues might change the above analysis in either direction.
It's true that police officers and their families do have 1st Amendment protections, but they are also governed by employment law and can be castigated by brass, fellow officers if they cause ripples which screw up a case or department morale.
> There's nothing stopping these people from talking to the press.
If you work for a company, were told that only the communications office was allowed to talk to the press about company business, the press asked you for a quote about something your company did, and you undermined the company's product/feature/initiative in a named quote, do you think your employer has the legal right to fire you for insubordination?
If it's police wives, they probably aren't allowed to have the information by department policy, so the officer who passed on that information could (and should) receive a reprimand.
With legal cases, police officers can't just go talking to press about a case because it could be used by the defense attorney to muddy the facts of the investigation or get some evidence thrown out.
My list was not comprehensive.
At what timestamp did the journalists tell the police officers that they had been instructed to stand there by another cop? I must've missed that part when I watched the video.
While less legally defensible it is much of the reason why the BBC, FCC exist, why we have camera crews embed with troops.
> I don’t know yet, though several of us on the council are working on finding out, what it would take to disband the MPD and start fresh with a community-oriented, non-violent public safety and outreach capacity.
It takes a lot of investment in the community, but it works: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/01/what-happened-to-crim...
Do you remember the helicopters shooting at helpers in ambulances? The drones being sent to weedings? The children being shoot in beaches?
If somebody can kill Osama Bin Laden without a trial and to became an hero, and other can kill Soleimani without a trial, then other can kill Floyd also without a trial, or beat Ian Murdock, or make Aaron Swartz commit suicide...
Extrajudicial executions are the new normal, and this magic trick was being slowly deployed in front of our very eyes, for years. And anybody is in the menu. We all travel in the meat train now. All is allowed, because we accepted the new contract.
The next handful of years is going to be interesting. Between civil forfeiture, marijuana decriminalization, self driving cars (and for the shorter term, coronavirus reduced driving) - police departments will be losing a significant amount of their current income streams; especially if unemployment returns back to its lows.
Everybody looks at automation in the food or retail industries; or health administration and insurance; but we have a police and prison system designed with illegal marijuana; that could shrink to 1/8th of it's size with relatively few changes in laws (drug law repeal, mandatory minimums, crime act).
I remembered this as being stated too the cops much clearer than it actually was. Likely I was mixing what they said with what the CNN reporters said later on when they were replaying this clip.
Here in Cincinnati the daytime protests have been very well run in general and non violent. In the evenings are when the criminal elements come out and wreak havoc. Just the other night Walter Smith Randolph, a black reporter I might add, was reporting on the after dark riots and he and his crew were pummeled with glass bottles by criminals driving around in cars after curfew. If the police shut it down it will be called an escalation, and in fact it was derided by the usual suspects, but what else are they supposed to do? I seriously cannot understand the idea that the police should not carry these people off to jail.
Or if you trust random internet stranger, you can Venmo/Zelle/PayPal me the money and I'll donate for you. I'm already on their list.
That said, I still found the attacks on the press this week absolutely shocking. Police treating people of color differently than white people is absolutely nothing new. Attacking and arresting credentialed journalists, while they are clearly identifying themselves and broadcasting on live TV is something I never thought I'd see in America.
If there is not, please consider the sacrifice of your data as part of your donation. I hope you fairly weigh the cost of unwanted solicitations for donations showing up at your home versus the cost of unwanted police violence against citizens in their homes in Minnesota.
This is where the department of justice, and state-level attorneys general should be able to check and balance the system, but current laws render them unable to do so effectively.
Even during the Obama years (Eric Garner happened while Obama was POTUS), when a DoJ that wanted to do the right the thing was empowered to, these laws were a huge impediment to progress.
I mean, they literally have a license to murder.
1) Institutional and culture view of policing, vs say other western countries that are more community policing based.
2) General brotherhood of law enforcement and protecting each other. There is a lack of holding each other accountable.
3) General protection afforded by law, either explicitly or implicitly via half hearted attempts at prosecution / investigation etc.
These combined gives law enforcement as an organization and individuals a sense of normalcy in what they do, and also feeling of invulnerability.
This doesn't apply to all police officers of course, and I actually believe the majority are law bidding and trying to do good in a tough environment. There are probably also a non trivial amount that gets into law enforcement to wield power over others. Law enforcement needs to be held to a higher standard, and because of the power they wield must be scrutinized much more closely.
However, the police deliberately targeting journalists who clearly identified themselves is something we haven't seen before in America. And yes, many of these cases were deliberate as you can see in the video embedded in the article. Just in a week, there were over 120 confirmed cases, many of which were live on camera. This is an attack on the free press, and takes police brutality to a whole new level.
Even during these protests we have instances of people being shot by the police and conflicted recollections from both sides of the events that took place.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/03/david-...
Record everything and hold everyone accountable for their own actions.
Have you tried either or are you assuming?
At the federal level, there are a few bills being introduced to deal with qualified immunity or other aspects that need addressing. These may not go anywhere, but more pressure may have an effect on that. Also, hopefully next time there's a massive economic downturn, officials remember that not supporting individuals makes the whole nation a powder keg, ready to spawn riots in all 50 states.
There's also historic precedent that protesting has a lasting change.
I suspect there's way less "cross" in that "cross fire" than the term you're using implies.
Interaction with police is one of the rare cases where self defence doesn't cut it. In fact, defending yourself just gives more justification for law enforcement to apply more violence.
Imagine if you were George Floyd, and you knew you were going to get killed. What do you do? If you don't resist you die. If you do resist you might still die or at least be assaulted, then charged with resisting arrest and will have "deserved" the violence by resisting at the end of it.
On the bystander side too. Everyone watching knew it was wrong, but there is no good way to intervene. You either put yourself in harms way, and probably won't effect the outcome, or intervening action will be used to justify whatever violence was used, or likely both.
Really?
Only about 18% of current prisoners (state and federal) are serving time for drug offenses. [1]
Of federal prisoners serving time for drug offenses, only 12% are primarily about marijuana. (54% are cocaine and 24% are meth.) [2]
Only 14% of federal offenders were subject to a mandatory minimum sentence. (About half of those were drug offenses, so this overlaps heavily with the 18% figure above.) [3]
No realistic minor changes could reduce the prison system to 1/8 of its size. 51% of prisoners are serving time for violent offenses. In fact, 14% of prisoners are serving time for homicide alone, and a similar number for rape. [4] So if you decriminalized _every_ crime except homicide and rape, and cut the sentences for homicide and rape in _half_, then the prison system would be 1/8 of its current size.
I am optimistic that the USA could eventually, in the very long term, reduce the prison system to 1/8 of its size. Fifty years ago, the prison system was 1/4 its current size. [5] Most western European countries have between 1/8 and 1/4 the US incarceration rate, and a few have below 1/8. [6] But this will require way, way, way bigger societal changes than just marijuana decriminalization or other minor tweaks.
[1] Source is https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=6846. Of the 1.274M state prisoners, 14% are serving time for drug offenses. Of the 162k federal prisoners, 47% are serving time for drug offenses.
[2] Source is https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/dofp12.pdf. Caveat: this is federal-only, and federal prison statistics are often different from state prison statistics.
[3] Source is https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu.... Caveat: this is federal-only, and federal prison statistics are often different from state prison statistics.
[4] Source is https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=6846 again. Of the 1.274M state prisoners, 56% are serving time for violent offenses (16% for homicide). Of the 162k federal prisoners, 8% are serving time for violent offenses (2% for homicide).
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
[6] https://www.statista.com/statistics/957501/incarceration-rat...
For some reason, you always have a few commenters who want dismiss shocking events by saying the shocking event is not 'surprising' or that it 'has always been happening' or was in some sense 'already known'. As if that should make it less morally outrageous. I've never understood what purpose that debate was supposed to serve.
You also don't beat journalists simply because you don't beat people not engaged in crimes.
I don't have any association with the company other than knowing the founders. No endorsement other than that they're good folks who want to help people have an easier time giving.
Which says something important about where the riot-gear-clad police are aiming their "cross fire". (And hence why the protests are needed, and why some of the protesters become violent after a few generations of the same old same old...)
Yeah, it's pretty indirect and not ideal. But it does work. My parents live in a town that dissolved their police force because police abuse caused the city to institute an income tax. This was a pretty far right town too.
When the taxpayers are citizens with voting rights they do bear responsibility for the actions of the state they voted in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity
"Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine in United States federal law that shields government officials from being sued for discretionary actions performed within their official capacity, unless their actions violated "clearly established" federal law or constitutional rights. Qualified immunity thus protects officials who "make reasonable but mistaken judgments about open legal questions", but does not protect "the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law"."
Is the bill of rights not "clearly established"? They've had long enough.
To me the phrasing seems clear, it's a lack of political will that's the issue. Not the law.
Democracy reflect the people, if the people sucks, the democracy will also suck. This is a feature not a bug.
It always seems hopeless though when my prejudiced neighbors think the protestors are wrong and should be shot. These prejudiced people can be police, lawyers, and judges. Even outside the justice system they clearly perpetuate systemic issues.
Not every tyrannical decision is made by the majority, and not every majority decision is tyrannical.
We make collective decisions, and we live with the consequences. Every election presents us with such a decision. Moreover, voting is not the limit. If you truly believe a particular candidate is bad, you are free to share your ideas, donate to his opponent, or perhaps even run against him yourself.
In that light, it's really amazing that your parents' town accomplished that. Instituting an income tax where there was none before is also drastic, so that must have helped a lot.
[1] https://action.aclu.org/give/make-tax-deductible-gift-aclu-f...
Modernism used paradox as a concept, ie. one meaning or the other is true but both cannot be, post modern reacts against that allowing for multiple similtaneous meanings. These paradigms are are discovered in different fields at different times.
but it isn't clear at least from the video, police are going out of their way to shut down the press, as in they have a press vendetta or want to censor
which is the impression i got was going on based on the headline and linked article
i accept i may just lack reading comprehension
At this point screw the fallout from the police union. Rip it up and renegotiate if the existing contractual obligations are too restricting. Realistically whatever recourse the union might have for breach of contract would be worth it. The most damaging action they could take would be to strike, and if they did public support would be against the police at this point and that would be a boon to appeasing the protesters. Heck, make it a PR stunt and start a campaign to get protesters to enroll in the police academy and fix the injustices they're marching for.
Either the PD gets replaced wholesale and the union can pound sand and the protesters are appeased or the union comes back to the table to come up with a reasonable deal that lets the municipality make some real changes to appease the protesters. Regardless of how they proceed serious accountability is crucial.
You can thank your president, who labelled the press as "The enemy of the people" for that too.
Words have consequences.
- Hannah Arendt
> This drug thing, this ain't police work. I mean, I can send any fool with a badge and a gun to a corner to jack a crew and grab vials. But policing? I mean you call something a war, and pretty soon everyone is going to be running around acting like warriors. They gonna be running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, racking up body counts. And when you at war, you need a fucking enemy. And pretty soon, damn near everybody on every corner is your fucking enemy. And soon, the neighborhood you're supposed to be policing, that's just occupied territory. You follow this? [..] Okay the point I'm making is this: Soldiering and policing, they ain't the same thing. And before we went and took the wrong turn and start up with these war games, the cop walked a beat, and he learned that post. And if there were things that happened on that post, where there be a rape, a robbery, or a shooting, he had people out there helping him, feeding him information. But every time I came to you, my DEU sergeant, for information, to find out what's going on out on them streets... all that came back was some bullshit. You had your stats, your arrests, your seizures, but don't none of that amount to shit when it comes to protecting the neighborhood now, do it?
- Howard "Bunny" Colvin in "The Wire"
These are the people you are defending.
> Where are news reports of protesters throwing rocks at riot police?
Yes, where are they? After all, you have to have this from somewhere. And after seeing the above scenes, keep in mind that this isn't two soccer teams who both have the same job. The police's job is to uphold the law, citizens don't have a job as such. They don't get paid to not break the law, they pay for the apparatus that punishes them if they break it (and let's too many cops go free when they do). The cops are armed, they get paid, they have special privileges to prevent such things, not to use them to do them.
Imagine a little child hitting an adult with all their force, and then the adult hitting back with all their force, and someone just saying "they're both being bad". Not that the cops are adults versus infants, but they do have levers and enjoy protections -- all paid for by the people they or their colleagues brutalize -- that multiply their force by many orders of magnitude.
Interestingly, the set of people complaining about each's actions are almost completely disjoint.
1) It's extremely difficult being a cop
2) It's extremely terrifying being a cop
3) It's extremely unpopular being a cop
It boggles me every time I hear people say cops need "stricter requirements" and "less pay" but never hear anyone volunteering to join the force and make real change. Look around, how many white knights want to be a cop?
The videos from Thursday/Friday night Minneapolis shape my framework for these riots, not the supposed abuse to protesters and reporters. IMO, given the circumstances, the cops overall have been very civil while taking an onslaught of verbal and even physical abuse. And don't get me wrong, I'm not ignoring police abuse and brutality.
It doesn't make sense to me that the losing bloc, which now does not have representation, is subject to the whims of the majority (that is the definition of the tyranny of the majority). A parliamentary system with proportionate representation makes more sense if "blame"for a representative is apportioned to the entire set of constituents and not the bloc that gained power.
Weird. I wonder why there's a Wikipedia article for something that's "not even a thing"[0].
> It's just a repackaging of Marxist ideals applied to other demographic groupings besides class, and it's just as easily disproven.
Can you cite a single critical theorist who simply transposes class analysis to "other demographic groupings"? The theorists I've read actually stray pretty far from the concept of class conflict, and they do not construct, for example, "gender conflict" or "race conflict" out of the "ideals" such as class conflict. Is there any evidence for your claim at all? Or are you claiming that any analysis of conflict between demographics is simply a repackaging of class conflict?
You fail to recognize the specificity of the idea of class conflict, and why it can't be "repackaged" as an abstraction. As an abstraction, all you're left with is "societal conflict", but nobody would deny that there is some conflict in society of some kind. The concepts of economic exploitation, alienation, historical and current primitive accumulation, base and superstructure, etc. are all core to class conflict analysis, but from what I've read, few if any of these are present in the literature on race and gender.
And while we're on the topic, can you point to which "easy disproofs" you're talking about as they relate to class conflict or "other demographic" conflicts? Ironically, the same critical theorists you claim "aren't a thing" were the same ones to argue against the traditional conception of class conflict (e.g. Marcuse).
https://reason.com/2020/05/19/qualified-immunity-supreme-cou...
Plus, I've seen little textual basis for qualified immunity at all.
It's unpopular to be a cop because by and large, cops have a tremendous deal of power (compared to an average citizen) and very little keeping them in check.
With great power comes great responsibility, so the saying goes.
> With great power comes great responsibility, so the saying goes.
So you acknowledge that it's difficult, terrifying, unpopular and requires great reasonability, but offer nothing for a solution. What good is your comment?
The police job is more stress than any content moderator on social media, because the police are living the content that gets moderated. They're subjected to immense violence because average citizens need protection from criminals.
Once again, do you have any decent solution or do you plan to just add to the stress of this critical and thankless job?
https://theappeal.org/ice-friendly-policies-a-string-of-jail...
“Sheriff candidates must have either an advanced certificate from the state’s Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, or a certain combination of education and law enforcement experience. The law, enacted in 1988, was devised by a subcommittee of the California State Sheriffs’ Association. Before then, the only requirement was that a candidate be registered to vote in the county.”
Where were Deukmejian and Wilson when this was passed?
My local electrician's union doesn't have dispensation from the state to utilize lethal force on me or my family. Also, if I'm wronged by an electrician in the course of their work, I can expect a fair result from the justice system. The stakes are different.
>So you acknowledge that it's difficult, terrifying, unpopular and requires great reasonability, but offer nothing for a solution.
You never asked for a solution. Your comment stated that the solution was to join the force; I merely pointed out that your solution doesn't work. If you want to shift the goalposts and put the burden of supplying the solution on me, then I invite you to seek out and listen to some of the changes asked for by the protesters - external checks and balances like citizen review boards for PDs.
>Once again, do you have any decent solution or do you plan to just add to the stress of this critical and thankless job?
Given how vocal the Blue Lives Matter crowd is, I'd hardly call being a police officer thankless. There are plenty of people who still think/believe that cops are infallible, shining knights of justice who can do no wrong, and if they do, well, that person had it coming anyway.
You mean marching down neighborhood streets and firing unprovoked at people on their own porches while yelling, "Light 'em up."
The philosophy is all about subverting epistemic certainty and rejecting the very concept of objectivity. Moral relativism isn't unique to Postmodernism, but it's a critical underpinning. As is the idea to reject objective truth.
You're arguing that I do not know what I'm talking about, except this was actually my field of study. I am very familiar with all aspects of Postmodernism and as I said before if you ask the Postmodernists they would agree with my assessment, although I'm sure they'd have more positive things to say than I do.