Death by gentrification: the killing that shamed San Francisco • Hacker News Board

Re: Death by gentrification: the killing that shamed San Francisco

#271

Post by tptacek » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:25 PM UTC

williamcotton wrote: post #257

JabavuAdams wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Calling he police on someone waving a handgun around in public is not "snitching," it's doing everyone a favor. From the perspective of someone who's used to the benefits of calling the cops outweighing the costs. The parent poster gives valuable insight into the thought process learned from the very real places where the cost of calling the cops outweighs the benefits.

The Mission and Bernal are very real places indeed. I heard a man gunned down by the cops just six months ago on a construction site on my block. Four years ago someone got shot execution style on the sidewalk 10 doors down from my apartment. That same apartment still had three bullets lodged in the walls and ceiling. Two years before that three people got blown away in a pizza restaurant underneath another apartment…

It sounds like a hard life out there in Bernal Heights.

Re: Death by gentrification: the killing that shamed San Francisco

#272

Post by tptacek » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:26 PM UTC

hga wrote: post #228

tptacek wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you cite a piece of police training material that suggests police be sparing with bullets once they commence firing at a target? Again, to be clear: I think the police should largely be disarmd . I do not think patrol officers should routinely be armed with handguns. I think it is monstrously silly to suggest that the solution to police shooting problems could somehow involve police being more judicious with the…

Sorry I wasn't clear enough: once you make the decision to use the lethal force of a gun, you keep shooting, as quickly and accurately as you can, until the threat is over. The only "judiciousness" in this comes in making the decision to start, and to stop after the threat is over, and of course the latter is not always clear.

I misunderstood you, and also wasn't very clear in my comment. You're right: the goal isn't to kill; it's just that no part of the goal involves avoiding killing.

Re: Death by gentrification: the killing that shamed San Francisco

#273

Post by fiatmoney » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:38 PM UTC

thaw13579 wrote: post #247

fiatmoney wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And which haven't been enforceable for ~70 years, where they existed in at all. Some stuff has happened since then.

And after that there was the FHA: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-raci... Yes, "stuff" continues to happen, for better or worse, but it's hard to believe that the state of housing is independent of bigotry given the evidence.

And those policies ended 50 years ago! Liberals have been in charge of housing policy for literally decades.

Re: Death by gentrification: the killing that shamed San Francisco

#274

Post by mcguire » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:39 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #158

NumberCruncher wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If somebody gets shot by the police because of having a gun like taser than, well, it´s exactly the right time to talk about gun culture and gun control.

I agree completely. In this case, it's worth remembering that the victim was reported, in a 911 call, to have been carrying a pistol. Not a taser. The police came to the park to confront an armed subject. Upon finding him, they told him to show his hands. He refused, and then pulled out his weapon. The police would have had just moments to decide what to do. You can imagine the level of adrenaline they were dealing w…

...and set up by military and paramilitary training to treat any potential threat as an actual, lethal threat. Furthered by the knowledge that the alleged aggressor was likely of an undesirable economic group and race.

Re: Death by gentrification: the killing that shamed San Francisco

#275

Post by mcguire » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:49 PM UTC

goldbrick wrote: post #264

the-dude wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.politie.nl/themas/schietincident.html

Perhaps it's my poor Dutch, but your link does not say that.

"An agent can also shoot to arrest someone suspected of a serious offense. In such situations has taught the agent on the legs of the accused to target. Where there is self-defense, the agent may shoot on the trunk of the suspect."

Modulo Google translation.

Re: Death by gentrification: the killing that shamed San Francisco

#276

Post by lostlogin » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:49 PM UTC

whatok wrote: post #260

lostlogin wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That he pointed the tazer is very much disputed.

Ok, I'll play along. Unless you believe the cops unholstered his taser and placed it on the ground, chances are it was in his hands. Time taken to raise object that appears to be a gun and shoot someone <= time to unholster and raise weapon to shoot someone. Police need to be proactive in situations like this because being reactive could lead to getting shot.

The article suggests his hands were in his pockets when shot and that police fired the tazer after he was dead. The current rate of police killings indicates something needs to change. Being proactive doesn't mean killing someone each time you feel threatened. This case shows how that can play out. A little more "reactive" is exactly what was needed.

Re: Death by gentrification: the killing that shamed San Francisco

#277

Post by foldr » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:50 PM UTC

cgriswald wrote: post #206

foldr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aaron Swartz commits suicide after being prosecuted for a crime that he did commit, and he's a martyr. A working class latino guy in San Francisco gets shot by the police because some white dudes didn't like the look of him, and it's basically his fault. Hacker news values.

"Hacker News" is not made up of a single homogenous group of people who all think the same things. That should be obvious by the commentary in this post. There is much debate and discussion. But even if the majority of posters find Swartz to be a martyr and Nieto to be "basically [at] fault", it does not necessarily mean the same groups of individuals feel both these ways, much less that racism is the reason, as you…

The point that the hacker news community is not homogenous is too obvious to be worth making. It doesn't imply that it's not possible to make generalizations about how it reacts to certain events.

Your second paragraph illustrates my point. In the case of Nieto, you're coming up with excuses for the police; in the case of Swartz, you're coming up with excuses for Swartz. There is no objective reason for excusing the authorities in the one case and the victim in the other. We know for sure that Swartz did a bunch of stupid things which had the entirely predictable consequence that he got in trouble with the law. Nieto may also have acted stupidly in this instance -- we don't know for sure whether he did or to what extent. But in the case of Swartz, we make excuses, whereas in the case of Nieto, we say "conceivably there's something he might have done differently to avoid being shot, therefore it's his fault he was shot". Apply the same logic to the Swartz case and you'd have to say that he also deserved what he got.

Re: Death by gentrification: the killing that shamed San Francisco

#278

Post by kamaal » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:57 PM UTC

tryitnow wrote: post #239

tptacek wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a person Rebecca Solnit chose to single out, carefully juxtaposing reports of his (incredibly obnoxious) behavior against Nieto's shooting, to which, even by Solnit's account (read carefully), he was not a party . I don't want to get drinks with this character in Solnit's story, either. But I'm not sure we should applaud the tactic of summoning up and focusing outrage on people like this.

Nope. Sorry, Evan Snow's recklessness in not getting his dog under control resulted in a innocent person getting shot, and cops whose careers are probably ruined. Snow deserves a big chunk of blame here. It's simple folks: if you're not highly confident that your dog will behave itself For those of you who still harbor sympathy for Snow, do a Google search for people who have been mauled by out of control dogs. Now S…

>>do a Google search for people who have been mauled by out of control dogs.

Also kids get killed being mauled by dogs.

Not sure why people don't get this. If you own an animal that can kill a human being, you don't own a pet, you own a very dangerous animal, responsibility of actions of whose should solely rely on you.

Pets are parrots, squirrels etc. Tender animals which can't cause meaningful harm to human life.

Re: Death by gentrification: the killing that shamed San Francisco

#279

Post by tptacek » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 5:59 PM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #276

whatok wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I'll play along. Unless you believe the cops unholstered his taser and placed it on the ground, chances are it was in his hands. Time taken to raise object that appears to be a gun and shoot someone <= time to unholster and raise weapon to shoot someone. Police need to be proactive in situations like this because being reactive could lead to getting shot.

The article suggests his hands were in his pockets when shot and that police fired the tazer after he was dead. The current rate of police killings indicates something needs to change. Being proactive doesn't mean killing someone each time you feel threatened. This case shows how that can play out. A little more "reactive" is exactly what was needed.

A very similar narrative was built for what happened in Ferguson: eyewitness testimony that the victim was no threat, claims that police assertions amounted to "superhuman powers" for the victim, &c.

Then the DOJ report more or less refuted all of those eyewitness claims.

The police were called to the scene based on a report of a subject brandishing a firearm. They found the exact person the report referred to. The subject was indeed armed (though not with a firearm). They did not need to tamper with evidence. They didn't need to fire the taser. In fact, doing so would only put them at risk, if they somehow managed to screw up firing it themselves.

The police probably did not fire the taser.

Re: Death by gentrification: the killing that shamed San Francisco

#280

Post by mcguire » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 6:06 PM UTC

egwynn wrote: post #24

raldi wrote: post #6

This is the taser Alex Nieto pointed at the police and refused to drop (if the police are telling the truth): http://i2.wp.com/missionlocal.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03...

Lacking any “real” contradictory evidence, I guess we have to take the police’s claim reluctantly at face-value. The police don’t exactly have an impeccable track record when it comes to on-the-record honesty, but in this case their (often inconsistent) testimony is all we’ve got. And when you combine that with the lead-up to his police encounter, where basically everyone he ran into (in this narrative) treated him d…

From the article:

"The city lawyers brought in a Taser expert whose official testimony seemed to favour them, but when he was asked by Pointer to look at the crime‑scene photos, he said the Taser was off and that it was not something easily or accidentally turned on or off. The light is only on when the Taser is on. Officer Morse had testified that when he arrived to kick it out of Nieto’s hands there was no red light or wires coming from it. The Taser wires are, however, visible in the police photographs documenting the scene."

Real contradictory evidence?