I'm saddened for my country and hope that this can be a turning point for all of us.
It's currently at 500+ instances of police brutality. https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1272306977872453634
I'm not saying the police doesn't do wrong, they absolutely do. We have examples of rapes, unjustified murders and beatings, entrapment. They are extremely rare. I think last year the police in the US killed 9 unarmed black men and 21 unarmed white men.
400 ... where there are videos. We know that until a video emerges these get swept under the rug, so I'm willing to bet that there are a fair few more than 400 examples of police brutality.
Now, how many are unjustified? That's the important question.
These aren't from all the years, they're from approximately May 26th of this year. It's 400 cases in the last 3-4 weeks.
That is a startlingly high number, made worse once you actually start digging into the individual incidents, because you realize they're not just isolated. A lot of these videos aren't, "a single police officer does something shifty", they're, "an entire police unit starts firing tear gas at protestors who are kneeling on the ground." And then you start to read the responses from police unions, some of which outright lie about the incidents or contradict the videos. This isn't a problem with individual officers, it's a problem with high-level commanders and police union leaders -- it's a problem that spans entire units.
I personally went through about 200 incidents for a separate project I was working on, some more in-depth than others. I think people are looking at these lists and thinking, "oh sure, but if you zoom in and examine each incident, it gets better." It really doesn't. It didn't take me long to get accustomed to seeing people tear-gassed, those videos don't even make me blink now. But even with that, I was regularly shocked while I was combing through videos with incidents that I wasn't prepared for.
"Tear gas, tear gas, tear gas, holy heck that police officer just body slammed a protestor! Tear gas, tear gas, holy crap they just punched a reporter in the face!"
And again, 4 weeks. Not years. I would challenge anyone who's saying that these are extremely rare or over-dramatized to sit down and devote an evening to just watching the videos in series. It weighs on you. And it quickly becomes obvious that these are not individual rogue officers, these are police units operating in an environment where they know they will not face consequences for hurting protestors.
The fact is, I'm a white dude in my mid-30's, I make a tech salary, and I'm afraid of the police, because an officer with a hair up somewhere could ruin my life for a period of time, if not for good.
And those videos have uncovered many instances the the police blatantly lying about their own misconduct in official reports, which is further evidence that the videos are only the tip of the iceberg.
The fear I think is more along the lines that police can detain you, arrest you and so on. So I just figure, why chance it? I optimize for lowest risk and I view police as an unnecessary risk.
But... aren't there riots everywhere right now? This isn't exactly a normal situation.
Also, are you suggesting that the riots are peaceful?
This is wrong.
https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed lists 1ists at least 104 unarmed black people alone killed by police in 2015.
I went though the first 20, and maybe 8 could have been accidents (one was hit by a car) or otherwise explained (2 pointed toy guns at police).
How do you stop someone pointing a gun at the police officer without brutality?
How do you stop someone attacking a police officer?
How do you stop someone going for their gun?
How do you stop someone going around shooting innocent people?
etc, etc, etc.
So apparently you haven't watched any of the videos, huh?
Guess what? The problem is that police are frequently "on edge" in their normal jobs, and as a result innocent people are seriously injured or die. And worse, police are "on edge" far more around blacks than whites, meaning far more blacks are injured by police than whites.
It doesn't matter what the cause is, it's a problem and is has to stop.
But even then, half of the cases sound like accidents, out of 104. The remaining is pretty close to 47.
There are plenty of sites that count the number of killings, but this is one of the few that looks for unarmed ones. If you are aware of better or more recent stats (for example the source of this 47 number) I'd love a link.
> half of the cases sound like accidents, out of 104. The remaining is pretty close to 47.
I find it mind-boggling that killing 52 unarmed people by accident is somehow the best case scenario here.
Yes, I watched a few from this link, and that admittedly small sample didn't show a single peaceful protester being abused by cops. I suppose you watched more of them?
>Guess what? The problem is that police are frequently "on edge" in their normal jobs, and as a result innocent people are seriously injured or die. And worse, police are "on edge" far more around blacks than whites, meaning far more blacks are injured by police than whites.
Could there be a reason for some of that that is not linked to racism? Are only white policemen more on-edge around black people?
>It doesn't matter what the cause is, it's a problem and is has to stop.
I can agree with that certainly.
Every municipality has different rules for officer's conduct. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (Part of the Federal US Department of Justice), there are 17,985 US police agencies, of which 15,400 departments govern the 39,044 distinct local governments and municipalities. These are further divided into autonomous administrative districts often referred to as precincts.
The rules for officer misconduct change in each municipality as reactions to prior conduct or complaints. The rules are based on edicts from the state, as well as interpretations of those edicts by the local police department which create internal policy. The level of compliance with creating and updating internal policies varies. No civilian is able to know or predict the various rationale an officer may use or is able to use to behave any particular way. Civilians learn after they have had a bad encounter with an officer, or are in jail or dead. Juries learn on the spot with prosecutor instructions, sometimes those instructions themselves are misleading or incorrect. The public does not necessarily ever learn what the standards were, and the media learns after the fact and only has a patchwork of "isolated incidents" that occurred in frankly different governing systems. When put together, this fuels discontent with police as an amorphous entity, an interpretation which fuels a growing divide of non-solutions.
So the term "justified" and "unjustified" means nothing because it is different and changing everywhere and is a term that only matches your pre-existing worldview, or your predilection to appeal to authority in counties and states you have never set foot in, let alone participate in.
TGD #1 shows a woman standing with a sign being run over by a horse. That's absolutely peaceful.
TGD #2 shows a woman who was walking backwards in front of a police officer being shoved so hard she flies several meters back and hits her head on the curb. She was in the officer's face, but she certainly wasn't doing anything close to rioting.
I'll watch more later, but so far that's 2/2 at the top of the list showing peaceful protesters being abused.
> Could there be a reason for some of that that is not linked to racism? Are only white policemen more on-edge around black people?
Depends on what you mean by "racism". There was a series of studies a few years ago that put people in classic "shoot / no shoot" scenarios that police are trained on (i.e., you go through a scenario and have to shoot someone before they shoot you, but only if there's actually a gun). They randomly changed the color of the skin of the people involved. Civilians shot far more blacks than whites in "no-shoot" scenarios. Police shot about the same, but there was a longer delay: meaning, their impulse was to shoot blacks faster, but their training allowed a secondary impulse to come in and moderate the first one. (Sorry I can't find a link just now.)
But there are a host of other issues as well.
That sounded interesting, so I tried to find some.
First one I found was this https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235256692_Results_f...
-- the conclusion seemed to be exactly counter to what the research you were talking about showed. "In addition, where errors were made, participants across experiments were more likely to shoot unarmed White suspects than unarmed Black or Hispanic suspects, and were more likely to fail to shoot armed Black suspects than armed White or Hispanic suspects."
Along with reading your other comments here, I viewed these 4 questions as a bad faith attempt at steering the conversation off topic. When people complain about police brutality, we are not talking about the times when police have to legitimately defend themselves or disarm someone. This thread is specifically about the hundreds of clearly documented examples of unprovoked violence by police in the US over the last few weeks, many of them against journalists, elderly people, kneeling protestors and so on. Please engage with that and don't try to change the subject again.
Germany has 16 state level and one federal, plus customs (not legally a police force with a lot less jurisdiction)
France has two, Police national and Gendamerie.
Obviously a slight oversimplification when counting stuff like the BKA / LKA (maybe the German equivalent to the FBI?) as seperate bodies. But roughly across Europe you have two levels,local and federal. Both are reporting, one way or the other, to the respective Ministeries of the Interior. Quite adifference compared to the US, where the highest authority can be a mayor. or none, if I understood the thing with local Sherrifs correctly.
Your use of "unjustified" is entirely subjective. I don't know what your specific threshold is for justified violence against peaceful protestors, and it's a waste of time to try and guess what that threshold is. It's a waste of time for us to filter the data, only for you to then point out two videos you disagree with and ask everyone to repeat the same work over and over again.
All of the raw data is available to you in a list format. If you think there are errors, then fork the repo, file a pull request, or create an issue. Make your own list that demonstrates your point.
> Officers arrested the man for violating a domestic violence no contact order and unlawful possession of a firearm
> the man went into cardiac arrest during processing.
> Correction officers began resuscitation immediately, police said, and the man was transported to the hospital while he still had a pulse. He later died at the hospital.
https://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2015/07/10/Physical-...
> Ms. Harris declined to comment through an Allegheny County Jail Health Justice project spokeswoman, but she has said that her son took an anti-seizure medication twice daily and called her from the jail to ask for help getting health care workers there to give him the medication
> He died of acute peritonitis due to colon perforation, and the death was ruled natural.
> Our records indicate that within ten minutes of Mr. Smart’s arrival at medical intake, our staff ordered the medications he said he needed, and he received those medications as prescribed. During an emergency event later that evening, our records show that our staff administered additional treatment to Mr. Smart and that he responded to the medical care provided.
This is an extremely misleading website and not a reliable source.