“Beautiful, clean coal.” Jesus, get your facts straight.
Man, if you think those guns would be clearly distinguishable during a foot chase from a distance, I don’t know, you’ve got better eyes than me. But I’d agree the cop may have erred by firing into a crowd.
@Soapyfrog – I definitely have a personality-level bias for authority-type figures (rwar), but that’s why statistics are so helpful. They can help us realize how silly our fears are. For instance, that’s why I backed out of the immigration thread temporarily in response to people’s crime stats. The statistics convinced me I was probably wrong to have the concerns I did about crime rates in Europe specifically (I would have thanked the posters for providing the statistics, but I’d have been personally criticized for that, too, so I opted not to). Of course, Europe may have an issue with “reporting” crimes, but I didn’t see great evidence for that.
If people here are going to claim it’s reasonable to fear cops for planting guns, it’s important to focus on more than a handful of anecdotes and look at broader crime stats to see what the real threats are.
Well, we’ve got an increasing number of cases where we actually have footage of cops planting weapons now.
There was that case in NC where the cop planted his own taser on the body of the guy after he shot him, and was captured on film.
On a related note, we have footage of a cop, captured from his own bodycam, showing him planting drugs to then “find”… only captured because he didn’t understand how the bodycam worked.
Oh, hey, this is actually a totally DIFFERENT case that I found while I was trying to find the one I knew about:
This is what I’ve started to realize, now that we are getting more and more videos since everyone has a camera these days… That cops apparently do this ALL THE TIME. Like, seriously, all the fucking time. And when you see these videos, it’s totally apparent that it wasn’t just one cop. ALL the cops there are in on it. They all know what’s going on. It’s their normal operating procedure.
That’s why I’m not as willing as I once was to give the cops the benefit of the doubt. I used to be. You can go back in this forum, probably in the cop shooting thread, or maybe the one actually about Eric Gardner, and see my views back then.
But they changed, because I’ve seen these videos, one after another. There are an insane number of dirty cops out there.
Until good cops are no longer willing to cover for bad cops, there really are no good cops.
You guys realize you allowed him to change the topic to cops planting weapons so he could argue statistics instead of actually talking about what Black Lives Matter actually means? He twisted the argument so he could distract from the actual problem. Points to the other topic that explains this tactic.
It would be better discussed in the “Cop Shooting Thread”.
I would love to hear what “Black Lives Matter actually means,” because my entire contention is that it is a movement founded on a literal misapprehension (“Hands up Don’t shoot”) that does exactly what it criticizes the police of doing: stereotyping based on negative anecdotes of a particular group of people. The police videos in this thread are terrifying, and so are the videos of police officers being gunned down every other week. The conversation seems to go nowhere beyond pre-existing prejudices without more comprehensive, non-anecdotal data into police misconduct. Is there any?
And now we’re at the “prove it to me that black lives actually matter” stage.
As if the internet wasn’t full of explanations about the movement.
There’s a lot of video data of police misconduct.
It means exactly what it says.
That black lives actually matter, and you shouldn’t make excuses for their loss as though they were worth less than the lives of white people.
It really shouldn’t be an offensive idea. The idea that black lives matter should be something that any reasonable, moral person accepts.
Sounds like the script is still working though.
- Say something contrary to the general feeling of this board (and/or humanity), not knowing (or feigning ignorance of) anything about it
- Others refute what is said, pointing to evidence, articles, etc.
- Move goalposts, then move on to the next controversial topic.
Specifically, like posting color-doctored photos of people murdered by cops so they look darker than they usually do. Or calling them “thugs.” Or using a particularly menacing photo of them over and over again while doing either of the first two.
Or in general just dismissing the murders of innocent black men and women as “the way it is.”
The key thing is that the status quo in our society seems to be that, often, black lives are regarded as being worth less than the lives of whites. Certainly when we say that, it’s upsetting and we don’t like to acknowledge it… but it still seems to be the case, regardless.
This is why the racist rebuttal of “ALL lives matter!” is nonsensical, because nothing about BLM suggests otherwise. There’s nothing about our society which suggests otherwise. White lives have always mattered. Society’s built on that notion. When white people get killed by cops, folks tend to ask questions.
BLM is simply demanding that same view be taken regarding black people.
And like I said… this is not an unreasonable demand, at all. No reasonable and moral person could possibly argue otherwise. Perhaps different people will have different views of how far off we are from that goal, but there’s no rational way anyone could say it was a bad goal.
Hey, if they didn’t want to get murdered then they shouldn’t have… checks notes… walked down the street in their own neighborhood? Been in their garage making noise? Noted a legal firearm was in their vehicle? Just been in their backyard?
Yeah, nevermind. That’s fucked.
Do you see this as an entirely one-way problem. In other words, do you think media reports that, say, emphasized Michael Brown’s cheery graduation pictures, as opposed to surveillance imagery of him violently robbing and assaulting a store clerk on the day of his death, may have also been manipulative? (As I understand it, this broader incident was the genesis of the BLM movement).
It is a good goal, but I think some media take it too far the other direction, and simply mischaracterize facts in an effort to humanize victims of police brutality.
@rowe33 – Dude, Nesrie literally told me to get back on topic, and I’m trying to comply with that. If you don’t want people in this thread who disagree with you, I’m sorry, I can’t help with that.
We should always humanize them, because they are human, no matter what the circumstances.
I don’t think there is any mischaracterization, except by Fox News and other racists.
Yeah, this is the playbook. There’s an actual video on this approach, and this is what he does. This is the Black Lives Matter topic, not the explain to me why people think cops plant guns on people all the time topic. And of course when that doesn’t work, send everyone out to spin their wheels to do some research or explain something else and then move the goalpost some more when they come back with the information he didn’t want anyway.
So since there is a cop shooting topic, perhaps that’s a better place for it. It’s been mentioned before, this isn’t just about cops as well.
You literally told me to talk about Black Lives Matter, then I started talking about Black Lives Matter. If that’s part of this mythical “playbook,” it seems reasonable to me. Sometimes, though, people will say negative things about Black Lives Matter. I hope you can handle that.
You are writing like the motivation for Black Lives Matter begins and ends with the Michael Brown story. Not even the riots in Ferguson begin and end with that. I found that reading Te-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me helped me have a fuller understanding of the motivations behind the movement, and that the message of Black Lives Matter is directed as much at African Americans as at police or the remainder of society.
In a previous post, you reference a National Review article that cites studies on police violence showing that African-Americans are actually under-represented as the victims of fatal police shootings. This is a good example of lies, damn lies, and statistics. Overall statistics on fatal police shooting include many examples of “suicide-by-cop” (a tragic circumstance and really a terrible burden on police officers.) Like other means of suicide, “suicide-by-cop” is much (3x) more prevalent among whites than African Americans. If these incidents are excluded, I think the remaining incidents would match up with the statistics on non-fatal police violence–also cited in the National Review article-- where African Americans are disproportionately victims.
This is the whole “bad apples” saying writ large. A couple bad cops can spoil the bunch. When cops do bad things like planting evidence or shooting unarmed men in the back, they undermine policing in those communities. The effect they can have in their zones is highly disproportionate to their number because they’re cops. They’re supposed to be defenders of the public. When they breach that trust, communities close up and make law enforcement that much harder.
Nowadays with video and social media, one bad act by a cop in one jurisdiction can ripple across the country and add to the impression that all cops are corrupt. It taints every cop.