Thrag
5262
One of the horrific ironies of the shooting in Atlanta of Rayshard Brooks is that the cops are justifying it by saying he pointed the taser he had wrestled off one of the officers at an officer. A taser. The thing that the police claim is nonlethal and is often used to force compliance. They had to shoot the guy because he pointed a deadly taser at them.
This tweet links to a very large set of polling results with some surprising findings, e.g. a plurality white voters agree Trump is a racist, and a plurality agree his response to the protests has been harmful. Buried in there is also this headline result.
People kind of want to defund the police. Like polling voters on whether they are ‘liberal’, it’s another one of those results where if you question voters on actual policy proposals you get a surprisingly different answer.
This is why I think you keep the defund rherotic out there, so you can do an actual defund and call it reform and folks will complain less.
One of my ideas would be a squad of units where are one cop, one social worker for wellness checks/low-violence situations.
THe social worker goes in first, the cop goes in if either the social worker or cop feels it is becoming a threat. The social worker does get training in self-defense, and has no arrest power, and can countermand whatever the cop says too.
This thread roll-up does a pretty good job of highlighting the preferential treatment of white, anti-BLM vigilantes by police, and also shows what sort of disgusting people make up that segment of the population.
Christpher Hitchens nailing the zeitgeist on this thread from 19 years ago…
“Beware when somebody tries to make the best the enemy of the good”
ZeTh1
5268
This is a bit of a tangent, the current issues are mainly about what is happening in the present, not the past. Racism is alive and well in the developed world, from NZ to Europe to the US and it manifests itself directly so it’s much more than the abstract idea Hitchens discusses in that video. I haven’t been to the US but I bet the same kind of shit happens there as it does here in Europe. Stuff like asking a black woman for her ID because the card she uses has a German sounding name or holding a handbag close while walking past a gypsy or the white dad’s awkward reaction when first meeting his daughter not white boyfriend. These are all acts of racism that are happening on a daily basis. And while us whites have to actively look for these things to notice them, non-whites have seen/felt them automatically since their childhood. The George Floyd murder is the tip of the iceberg, a tiny section of a huge problem.
This citizen is incredibly brave.
There is a good deal of scholarship which suggests that, in the US at least, systemic racism is a continuous condition dating from the distant past.
You can’t separate the current economic socioeconomic condition of people of color in the country from the depredations of slavery and the backlash of subsequent legal and illegal oppression of free people of color that followed the brief reconstruction era. Poor black neighborhoods exist because of legal and illegal redlining designed to confine black people to segregated ghettos. Those neighborhoods, being poor, have poor schools, which leads to poor educational outcomes, which leads to successive generations trapped in poverty. Living in poor neighborhoods with higher levels of unemployment leads inevitably to higher levels of crime, which in turn sparks white fear and leads to oppressive policing.
This is the entire point of the reparations discussion and why it isn’t simply about the horrors visited on black people historically. It is about the entire continuum of oppression including hostile policing and police abuse, and I don’t think we can really dismiss it as about some remote historical injustice.
Argument #3874289736587 for demilitarizing the police. Why the hell are those guys armed, in camo, wearing kevlar to respond to a guy filming shit? It’s deranged.
Yes, that was my reaction too. Plus that one guy says his title / name was Detective Somebody. WTF is a detective doing in that gear?
I didn’t catch that, that’s somehow even nuttier.
Do we have an y kind of timeline on when the military started selling all their surplus stuff to police departments? I feel like that particular trend is comparitively recent and is (obviously) just exacerbating the hell out of all the pre-existing problems. Racist shitbag with a gun and ab adge is bad enough, racist shitbag who feels totally invincible because he’s in military tactical gear and heavily armed is that much worse.
The program was started under Clinton in 1997, as part of the war on drugs. Which means, of course, it was always part of a racist endeavor.
Thanks, that’s definitely something I should already have known and yes, the whole thing is rotten to the roots.
Love this exchange at the end:
“Don’t do anything illegal.”
“No, no, no. Don’t you do anything illegal.”
Thrag
5277
The meaning of the “Detective” rank can vary from one PD to another and doesn’t necessarily mean a Lennie Briscoe type of police detective. So that aspect of the video might not be as WTF as it seems.
I thought the main reason they were responding was the guy was open carrying a weapon not because he was filming. Not sure why it takes 8 cops in Camo though to do that. Alhtough, I can say I blame a cop for wearing Kevlar when responding to somebody carrying a weapon.
rowe33
5280
Complete trash obviously. He references first responders, firefighters, etc, in his tweet about it but his car is 100% about cops.
Same guy:
It’s an open carry state. So do 8 cops in body armor approach every person who is carrying? I’m guessing not.
