In the moment, with everyone and everthing going on around her, I doubt she was thinking rationally or even knew that torching a car would be a long prison sentence. (if someone asked me before reading this article, I would have assumed a large fine + some community service maybe; then again I am not American so I have no idea how sentences compare).
"Everyone else was doing it" didn't fly with my mom, and probably won't get a pass from Judge Wapner, either.
Kneeling didn't work, soooo...
Expected respondes: pass a law. Protest peacefully. Stand in front of city hall with assault rifles. Vote for (some centrist).
Just because you may not like how someone is dealing with the fact that they could be killed with no recourse by cops because of the color of their skin, doesn't mean their methods are invalid or even irrational.
The classic star wars question - is Luke Skywalker a rebel hero, or a terrorist threat to order? Before the Empire blew up an entire planet to make a point, it was a fairly valid question.
Some people think police should pay for the abuses that they regularly and without punishment do.
Some others think police should stop existing in general, or exist only in a very limited capacity, or be replaced by citizen patrols, and several other varieties...
So, that morality and cause... Doesn't have to agree with yours to be a morality, and even less so to be a cause...
If only the FBI used the same zeal in going after the perpetrators of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wk-mRv1Nlo
It turns out, Americans pay attention when you start smashing property and taking flatscreen TVs.
huh, because you almost never see the cops caught committing crimes with their own dash cams. Seems to always be off when they commit a crime in front of their car.
It also demonstrates that by and large, police don't prevent chaos and property damage. Most of the time, people simply decide not to do this, and when they decide they want to, police are largely powerless to stop them. This should lead others to more broadly question whether police are capable of stopping other bad actors, rather than merely reacting to them.
I don't know why, but as a general rule with people, if it bleeds, it leads. And that's what's worked here.
Which is the logic behind Qualified Immunity.
If she's going to jail for torching a car, then will the officers that committed similar property damage also be going to jail?
That phenomena is why I don't participate in this sort of events. The best way to avoid getting swept up in a mob mentality is to avoid the mob in the first place.
Anybody thinking of going outside and playing anarchist should know what they're getting themselves into, wait until your cellmate tells you that they're getting out in 2 months and you have to hold their contraband and weapons or the guards decide to put you in a high security yard because you're in there for something ridiculous like 'terroristic threats and arson'. You don't ever get out on schedule
I want to see people use live streaming to debate first, but then organize so effectively to just swarm on the old systems to make change. People need to move faster.
Given episodes 7-9, Luke is a terroristic threat to order. After destroying the existing order, he failed to establish anything better and it quickly devolved into what we see in 7. And he also failed to kill the main villain which meant that all the chaos and death that he was responsible for had no offsetting good.
Then if someone can't pay it back, you either have to 1) not penalize them, making poverty equal immunity, or 2) jail them, making it jail for the poor and a fine for the rich. Neither seems fair.
It's far more costly to incarcerate than to get repayment for almost everything. It's still more costly to incarcerate than to just forgive the debt and make it painful enough to not repeat.
"If convicted, the defendant faces a maximum possible sentence of eighty years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, and a fine of up to $500,000."
She might be charged with terrorism crimes, but either way it looks bad for her. At least a felony - even without prison time that will sting.
Philly Inquirer article has more on other cases where "alleged arsonists" are being caught via social media posts.
Yes you do. You might not get away with it, but that's not really pertinent.
In fact historically most change happened through people breaking laws because of their beliefs and anger.
And in every past society, like ours, most thought its laws are the apex of law-making, and should never be challenged or broken in anger, nor its law agents assaulted etc. Only history doesn't work that way.
In 2015, according to [0], the average was about half that.
> minimum sentence of 5 years is going to run 1.2 mil
How do you get from 70K (presumably per year) to $1.2M over five years? On average it should be more like $135K, with some cheaper states spending about half that.
[0] https://www.vera.org/publications/price-of-prisons-2015-stat...
No, we don't know that.
Historically it has been violence that stopped violence, and crime (like toppling an unjust government, breaking segregation laws, etc) that stopped crime.
>People should use modern tools to reduce racial issues. Like voting or social media’s, never burn a state property.
Yeah, they've tried blogging about it. There are also tons of books on the matter, vlogs, articles, etc. They voted Obama twice. Didn't work.
A few months of angry riots and a few burned down police departments though, could send a very clear message to politicians and police chiefs, and help change laws to restrict police abuse.
I don't live in the US but I know someone who spray painted trains at night for a few year. That eventually did cost him a decent car. Obviously not as much as he caused damage over the years but enough to make some teens think twice whether a nice car or temporary colored train are their short term goals.
Black people in the US constantly fear being killed or harassed by police. Yeah, burning a car doesn't solve anything, but keeping quiet and playing ball since the civil rights movement hasn't really moved the needle. Policing and constant surveillance of black communities has gotten worse since then, and protections for police, both legally and politically, have increased. Sometimes you have to burn a car or break some glass for the nation to pay attention.
Also I would say that the initial reaction of rioting is what drove people to organize and peacefully protest, and in a lot of US cities and states, the combination of these has already resulted in policy change. I'm sure most of these people are also posting on social media and planning to vote as well.
I guess this is a long winded way of saying that torching a car is small potatoes compared to government sanctioned murder and oppression, and this kind of thing is forcing people to pay attention and have conversations about this stuff.
World War II and the US civil war didn't ended the violence, it just changed the way that violence manifests. If you look in many groups on Facebook, 9gag or redit , you will see Violence in protests are being used to create more hate in people who hates. I really believe that the society was improved by ideas not wars.
There have been instances in the past where fires set have spread and killed numerous people. People get freaked out and push for harsher sentences.
I have a hard time imagining smashing cars would result in that harsh of a sentence.
King survived, but two innocents were murdered by a black man who sought to assassinate Koon[0].
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200604062152/https://www.latim...
Police departments around the country are being downsized, kicked out of their unions, and in some cases defunded entirely. That's good news! The money will be used for better things.
It's not the sort of thing HN likes to hear but the techniques used in these protests are pretty much working as expected.
These numbers are quite a bit lower, I was reading the CA LAO numbers from 18-19 the other day and didn't really factor in cheaper states.
Even at 135k, the cost to society is 135k + the cost of the car + lost productivity of the individual and the economic drag that has on the immediate community, family/roomates/partners and such. At that price, getting community service is a major cost savings and getting repayment is even better.
The police are not perfect. We need to hold them accountable to some reasonable standards of behavior. But if you defund them entirely, then what do you expect is going to happen? Peace and harmony?
No, what's going to happen is that criminals will still be criminals, and perhaps bolder and more blatant criminals. Drug addicts will continue to be drug addicts, and will do crazy things while they're high, and crazy things in order to get money to get high. Such people will continue to interact with non-criminal non-addict people, who will feel threatened. But now the police won't be there. Now what?
In a country with an armed population, the police probably reduce the number of misbehaving people who are killed, because (for all their flaws) they are still less trigger-happy than a frightened gun-owner who feels threatened by an encounter with some strange-acting person.
As someone who has had many of these encounters, I've never had the police help. At best they'll show up a half hour later and take a report. The police were never "there" in any meaningful sense.
> because (for all their flaws) they are still less trigger-happy than a frightened gun-owner who feels threatened by an encounter with some strange-acting person
Time after time, this has proven to not be true. When a frightened gun-owner reaches for his weapon, he knows he is risking all his money and probably his freedom if he's found to have fired it when it wasn't necessary. And so they tend to use some discretion. Cops do not risk the same, and so they shoot people all the time when their life isn't threatened.