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A collection of videos of police brutality

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Re: A collection of videos of police brutality

#401

Post by pstuart »

h3cate wrote: post #388
pstuart wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Require police to be self-insured, backed by their pension plan * Refactor qualified immunity for police work (no more carte blanche) * Legalize all drugs (tax and regulate, treat abuse as a medical issue) * Legalize and (and regulate the hell out of it) sex work * National LEO database to prevent bad cops from moving one county over * National guidelines and certification of police behavior (a Geneva convention of…

Personally I agree with all of those points however I know there is a lot of passion on both sides of the argument for most of those points. Hopefully one day soon we will start to see meaningful change

Gotta start somewhere :-).

The goal would be to properly frame it and promote it.

Re: A collection of videos of police brutality

#402

Post by nojvek »

dang wrote: post #350
quietthrow wrote: post #198

This post was number one on HN. Now it’s nowhere to be found on HN’s pages unless you search for it. I happen to remember the posters handle and was able to dig up the post. The post is not even flagged back so am curious why did it disappear?

Users flagged it. That's usually the reason.

Not sure why it was flagged but I use hn.algolia.com and it was one of the top links.

I upvoted it. The police are making the situation worse and people need to know they are no longer the police who are their to protect them but the police who are abusing their power and worse than terrorists.

This issue is way more important than SpaceX launch.

It could mean we don’t have the next black Astronaut, or the next minority space engineer, or the next minority Elon Musk. Because a minor police encounter would have led to their death.

Re: A collection of videos of police brutality

#403

Post by scarface74 »

h3cate wrote: post #396
austincheney wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were talking about stop and frisk opposed to racial profiling more specifically. So I looked that up and it looks like Texas has already achieved transparency on that matter: https://www.tcole.texas.gov/content/racial-profiling-reports Transparency is the only way to root out actual and suspected corruption. It’s not a cure but a required prerequisite.

Sadly stop and frisk is something that cannot be done un-subjectively. Again like with most debates there are good arguments on both sides. It however comes down to where you draw your conclusion. It's a thin line that has to be carefully toed and when everybody has different ideas on what powers others should or should not have against them it is usually hard for all sides to agree

It seems to be a lot easier for people to think it’s okay as long as it doesn’t affect people that look like them. It’s like the tired “few bad apples” line.

Many of the same people on HN want government involvement because their favorite app can’t be side loaded on an iOS device (a few apps) but excuse police brutality. How many submissions have been flagged on issues regarding police brutality on HN while submissions about an app that Apple wouldn’t allow make the front page?

It shows you where people’s priorities lie.

Re: A collection of videos of police brutality

#404

Post by dang »

h3cate wrote: post #400
koheripbal wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, people forget that not literally every website needs to be an activist forum.

Far from it. The internet should be the inclusive society that we seem to be unable to attain in the real world.

I agree with that and wrote something similar in a little essay about HN recently. The challenge is how to get there. I don't think we can flamewar our way to peace on the internet.

Re: A collection of videos of police brutality

#405

Post by dang »

nojvek wrote: post #402
dang wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users flagged it. That's usually the reason.

Not sure why it was flagged but I use hn.algolia.com and it was one of the top links. I upvoted it. The police are making the situation worse and people need to know they are no longer the police who are their to protect them but the police who are abusing their power and worse than terrorists. This issue is way more important than SpaceX launch. It could mean we don’t have the next black Astronaut, or the next minor…

There's no question that it's more important. Of course it is more important than basically everything on HN's front page. For example, HN had a front-page story yesterday about whether the French adopted vinaigrette from the Italians. Such a topic is unimportant to the point of triviality.

People sometimes feel like if a story isn't on HN's front page, that we, or the community, feel like it's unimportant. That's not it at all. Rather, importance is not the quality that organizes HN. If it were, HN would not exist. An entirely different website, or no website, would exist in its place.

The organizing principle of HN is intellectual curiosity [1]. Everything we do here derives from that [2]. In the case of a thread like this one, the question I have as a moderator (not as a human being or a citizen) is whether this community, in its particular manifestation in this thread, is able to have a thoughtful conversation in which curiosity is present, or whether it is not. We sometimes turn off user flags if the answer is yes, but not if the answer is no.

That doesn't necessarily have to do with the story itself being on-topic or off-topic for HN. A story like this (or rather the cluster of stories around George Floyd, the protests, the riots, and related topics like police violence) is too big to be called on-topic or off-topic. It depends on the particular submission and the particular thread. HN has had several major threads related to this story and I'm sure it will have more.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: A collection of videos of police brutality

#406

Post by scarface74 »

h3cate wrote: post #372
scarface74 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t go that far. The US has so many guns it would be suicide for police not to have them.

When you can walk into a supermarket and buy a machine gun off the shelf, I would agree with you. If you take the guns off everybody though, this changes completely. All of a sudden you don't need a lethal weapon and instead can start carrying none lethal weapons. That's a whole different debate though

A “War on Guns” won’t take the guns from everyone. The “War on Guns” will target minorities just like every other “War on $x”.

See the “War on Drugs” in the “inner city” and “Treat Drugs like a Disease” when it affects “rural America”.

Re: A collection of videos of police brutality

#407

Post by scarface74 »

leereeves wrote: post #354
scarface74 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who were they protecting themselves against by coming in with guns? Why else did they do it if not to intimidate? Do you think 20 or 30 armed Black men could have gotten away with this? https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2020/05/05/PDTF/5969fca5-...

This conversation has gone too deep, deeper than Hacker News can handle, so we should probably wrap it up. I'll just say that if 20 armed black men couldn't get away with protesting in Michigan, that says something very bad about the Democrats who run the state.

You act as if I think Democrats are holy saints with respect to equality.

But those policemen probably weren’t wearing Black Lives Matter under their uniforms.....

Re: A collection of videos of police brutality

#408

Post by yetanotherjosh »

h3cate wrote: post #379
libraryofn wrote: post #149

If you're actually trying to fix a problem, there are better ways to go about it. Why not try to build evidence to determine the reality of the situation? There is nothing honest or good about building a one-sided repository that serves only to confirm political dogma. What if a fair judgement of the evidence shows that black police officers treat black people no better than white police officers? What if white polic…

Thanks for your feedback. With the help from some people here the site has been updated with more info about each case including what has/hasn't been done in each situation. Going forward, no video will be uploaded without first gathering this information and verifying the context of the video. Please say if you feel there is still information that needs to be added that can help.

Aren't you trying to act as a courtroom, though? The main issue I have with your site is that your fundamental premise involves a presumption of guilt. You declare this behavior "brutality" (which implies a forgone conclusion of injustice and the misuse of force) before a fair system of investigation, testimony, factual analysis, and so on, can be performed.

I'm not saying these videos aren't showing an injustice and a misuse of force, I'm saying that making a fair conclusion is complicated and should be done by a complex process that you can't hope to do yourself. And if you simply aggregate videos of police using force and label them all as brutality, frankly you are abandoning the ideal of justice in the pursuit of it.

Your site should present these videos as acts that warrant investigation, not as a wall of shame for (assumed) guilty/bad cops (even though many of them are guilty/bad).

There is deep, systemic injustice in our society, and there are murders and brutalities taking place all too often, and this does demand action and attention. I applaud action to that effect and I honor that you are motivated by the pursuit of justice. But you need to recognize that it is a challenging task that requires a measure of elevated ethical discipline in order not to backfire or undermine itself. The principle of "innocent until proven guilty" is a core precept of a good justice system, but not one that your approach seems to embrace.

Re: A collection of videos of police brutality

#410

Post by sneak »

non-entity wrote: post #373
GiorgioG wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The more recent history suggests that the people who wish to deter or educate the cops are significantly outgunned Then these young people (in the U.S.) should stop fighting for gun control when it only works against them in times such as these. Can you imagine how these protesters would be treated if most of them were carrying a rifle? Could the police roll out tanks in response? Sure, but I do not believe the U.S…

> Can you imagine how these protesters would be treated if most of them were carrying a rifle? Branded as a terrorist organization so that use of extreme and possibly military force could be justified?

That’s happening anyway now.

Obviously the best thing to do is avoid fighting. However, if you’re going to be in a fight, it’s better to be armed than unarmed, if for no other reason than to encourage your opponent not to force a fight.

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