Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
That stat becomes more useful when you take into account black Americans are roughly 15% of the population.
De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer
221–230 of 799 posts
Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
They will not listen just because a couple thousand people break windows and light things on fire. They will instead tell us there is no choice but to make this more of a police state. The only thing that may work is to get everyone to use their voice. Historically, probably only a tiny fraction of the population have used their voice. The vast majority of us need to stop being silent.
> They will instead tell us there is no choice but to make this more of a police state. Let them try...
You don't understand the power the government can wield if there is "justification" for it. The only way to have the government serve us instead of control us is to be loud, in the majority, and peaceful. At least in a country like the US.
Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a video of a cop pushing a kneeling woman and then a black woman police officer yells at him for a little bit, that’s about it. I guess you could count the video of a Seattle cop telling another cop to take his knee off of a protester’s throat.
There are literal videos of cops kneeling with protestors in shows of solidarity. Peacefully talking. In LA they're sitting right now. I cannot believe how far people will go seeing what they want to see.
You are arguing a completely different point than your parent/thread.
You are saying "there exist police departments which are friendly with the protesters".
The thread you are replying to isn't talking about protests; it's discussing the absence of evidence where police officers actively intervened and stopped the excessive use of force by a fellow officer.
In the USA, a civilian doesn't have the right to defend themselves from an officer under any circumstances in most states. A very few states allow you to shoot to defend yourself (even from officers who don't present themselves as officers) under very narrow circumstances. Any way you cut it, police are given benefit of the doubt when interacting with suspects but the cheaper internet-connected cameras get, the more evidence that we should probably revisit that long-held doctrine.
Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Would you feel that way if they came and burned your house or business down? Yup, and I have the receipts to prove it: my motorcycle was vandalized in Oakland during the protests. A small price to pay for unsung voices being heard. You say violence is violence, yet I bet you have no problem with criminals being put in jail, i.e. their freedoms being violently removed from them.
> You say violence is violence, yet I bet you have no problem with criminals being put in jail, i.e. their freedoms being violently removed from them. When you commit a crime and violate someone's freemdoms (the primary being right to life, liberty, property), you forfeit your own. When you kill someone and take their life, you steal or destroy property, you are now in debt to society. By living in a society you agre…
Police brutality is a systemic issue. Peaceful protest over the years haven't changed the system. Charging that one officer doesn't solve it either.
The Police reaction to these protests clearly shows systemic reform is needed. Peaceful protesters and reporters have been tear gassed, shot, and arrested. They don't deserve to be tret like that just because others decided to vandalize and loot.
Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being a police officer is a difficult, thankless, dangerous job, yet critical for a functional society. You don't get the same resources, respect, or pension of the military. If you are let go/fired, you have little chance of finding something comparable close by. It's not healthy for the psyche to be put into harm's way for an entire career span. There is probably a lot of untreated PTSD going on. It's not surprisin…
Police are praised as heros and, when you count the pension, make 5x more money than the typical immunology PhD student (without whom we would likely literally be entering a new multi-century dark age). Lots of people do hard society-critical jobs that take an emotional/physical toll at wages far below that of a typical officer. Only one of those occupations has a serious violence problem. I can’t even imagine a worl…
Definitely not excusing any behavior by the police. But if you lump all officers, departments, and cities together you are never going to get anywhere with reform.
I only have a vague idea what police officers make. Generally, I avoid begrudging anyone's salary.
Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They will instead tell us there is no choice but to make this more of a police state. Let them try...
You don't understand the power the government can wield if there is "justification" for it. The only way to have the government serve us instead of control us is to be loud, in the majority, and peaceful. At least in a country like the US.
[deleted]
Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your motorcycle isn't your shelter and vandalism isn't typically complete destruction.
> Your motorcycle isn't your shelter Not seen news come out of people's homes destroyed. If we're going to participate in a damages competition, though, let's do that - the cops shot out a couple people's eyeballs, but only after of course kicking off this whole thing by murdering black people with no consequences. There, that settles that.
> murdering black people with no consequences.
Can you elaborate? All four of the police officers were immediately fired. The primary officer that was kneeling on him was charged with murder and manslaughter and will go to prison. Likely charges will be brought on the other three.
Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree that any responsibility should fall to the protesters. The right to protest is baked into the first legal document the country as a political entity wrote. For the last 250 years politicians and cops have had the knowledge that Americans care a great deal about their right to stand in front of a statehouse and shout to their heart's content. They should create their own policies to deal with that fact. If…
Now that being said, black lives matter in particular suffers from (in my opinion) a lack of leadership and organization. A universal problem with "leaderless movements" is that they quickly devolve to the lowest common denominator level. Anyone can put out their slate and call themselves an "activist" and it's inevitable that some dim person will come along and try to make a name for themselves by taking things fart…
> A universal problem with "leaderless movements" is that they quickly devolve to the lowest common denominator level. Anyone can put out their slate and call themselves an "activist"...
I appreciate this part a lot. It helps me realize that movements also have brands they need to manage and have similar struggles to companies that are trying to manage brands at various levels of centralization—e.g., the challenge of maintaining brand alignment among distributed franchisees.
> A "leaderless movement" has all of the biomass of a huge national organization, but none of the immune system and command/control to counter such organized exploiters.
I wonder how well leaderless movements can create things. It seems as organizations and movements become less coordinated, less structured in how to resolve internal conflicts and align, that they would be more suited to attacking things or ideas, rather than building them.
Any thoughts on this?
Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s striking to me is the stark differences in policing with the US vs other common law/Anglosphere countries, where policing is by consent. I guess the other countries were still much more under British influence during the formation of policing?
US Police and the US public see the police as enforcers in a caste system where the public is at the bottom, the enforcers are on top of them, with the lords above them. So the police aren't on the side of the public because they see the public as chaotic animals, to be managed lest they descend into anarchy. That's the general view and you can see that in The Thin Blue Line. In the UK, you can make fun of the police…
There are many corners of this country that offer what you describe but they aren't on a map.
Not even rural areas necessarily. The US remains a diverse and rich place, despite all efforts to distill its culture to a sound bite.
Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
The 2020 data there is interesting. It's less dramatic than it looks on that graph because they only have the numbers from the first quarter for 2020, but even extrapolating from the quarter to the year, it looks like "number of people shot to death by the police in the United States" has been more than cut in half by the coronavirus.
I noticed that too, and had the same thought. It will be fascinating to see the full statistics for the year.