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Breonna Taylor case: Louisville police nearly blank incident report

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Re: Breonna Taylor case: Louisville police nearly blank incident report

#171
post #7

USA Today has the best coverage of this I’ve seen. The NYT coverage of this is awful: https://www.nytimes.com/article/breonna-taylor-police.html A key fact is that the police shot Taylor after her boyfriend shot at the police, thinking they were intruders. While he was fully entitled to do that, the NYT doesn’t believe in gun rights so that’s a messy fact. To make the victim seem more sympathetic, the narrative under…

Well said. I learned about this incident from the coverage in the NYT, and this was exactly my sequence of reactions. I remember thinking, “wait a second, did I miss something?” at one point, and re-reading the article from the beginning.

Re: Breonna Taylor case: Louisville police nearly blank incident report

#172
post #7

USA Today has the best coverage of this I’ve seen. The NYT coverage of this is awful: https://www.nytimes.com/article/breonna-taylor-police.html A key fact is that the police shot Taylor after her boyfriend shot at the police, thinking they were intruders. While he was fully entitled to do that, the NYT doesn’t believe in gun rights so that’s a messy fact. To make the victim seem more sympathetic, the narrative under…

The reason USA Today's coverage is best is because the real reporting is coming from the local newspaper, Louisville Courier-Journal. They're a Gannett property so it ends up getting published through USA Today as well.

Re: Breonna Taylor case: Louisville police nearly blank incident report

#173
post #109
post #7

USA Today has the best coverage of this I’ve seen. The NYT coverage of this is awful: https://www.nytimes.com/article/breonna-taylor-police.html A key fact is that the police shot Taylor after her boyfriend shot at the police, thinking they were intruders. While he was fully entitled to do that, the NYT doesn’t believe in gun rights so that’s a messy fact. To make the victim seem more sympathetic, the narrative under…

What you say is obvious is not obvious at all. I expect police not to shoot back if the situation is such that the person that is shooting back could reasonably act in self defense (as was here the case). Then I expect police to take the strategy of simply retreating and getting to safety. Obviously that’s associated with a higher risk for the police but to my mind that is a risk police have to accept if they want to…

> The other alternative is to not execute search warrants in that way.

When you boil it all down, this is the answer. The main reasoning behind no knock warrants is to prevent evidence destruction. The harm of a drug dealer flushing some drugs down the toilet versus potentially killing innocent people isn't even in the same ball park. And really, how many flushes can some get in the 15-30 seconds that it takes for cops to rush into the house?

Sometimes the argument is that no knocks are for armed and violent suspects but even then it's not clear a no-knock raid makes it any safer for anybody. Police could just as easily wait until someone leaves the house in the morning and execute the arrest with far less risk.

Seems like no-knock raids should be outright banned for local law enforcement at the least.

Re: Breonna Taylor case: Louisville police nearly blank incident report

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obviously nobody expects the police not to shoot back when fired upon Well, I do. We had a case in Germany a few years back where the police served some kind of no-knock warrant, the guy (a Hells Angel) thought they were from a rival gang, shouted at them and then shot at them. A Policeman died, the guy dropped his gun immediately after police identified themselves. The Case made the news later because the guy got…

That's great that German police are trained to react that way. But American police are not. American police are trained to prioritize their own safety and survival above the safety and survival of suspects or even innocent bystanders. There's no consideration of intention or what information people are acting on - if there's a potentially lethal threat to the policeman, it must be dominated and suppressed. So yes, wi…

Isn't this one of the main things that people are protesting about. Police shouldn't be trained like this. They could also carry things like tasers which allow them to protect themselves without killing anyone.

Re: Breonna Taylor case: Louisville police nearly blank incident report

#175
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course news agencies should report that the US Senator has that opinion. There are plenty of news agencies that reported on the fact that the NYT published this opinion piece, for instance, and I don’t think people are too upset about those reports. It’s the publishing of the opinion piece that is the issue.

News agencies shouldn't report that because the Senator didn't say that. He made it very clear he was talking about rioters and looters, not protestors: > Those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters. A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants. And nowhere in the op-ed did he call for murdering or kill…

When someone advocates for "taking no quarter", they're advocating for killing people. You may say the average person doesn't interpret that phrase that way, but a former Army captain like Cotton knows full well what it means.

The thing about the whole argument of, 'we only advocate cracking down on rioters and looters' is how is someone supposed to get that distinction right in the fog of a chaotic situation? Arrest people and have them face trial. Advocating violent and potentially lethal crackdowns on people in situations like this is what brutal autocracies do.

Re: Breonna Taylor case: Louisville police nearly blank incident report

#176
post #7

USA Today has the best coverage of this I’ve seen. The NYT coverage of this is awful: https://www.nytimes.com/article/breonna-taylor-police.html A key fact is that the police shot Taylor after her boyfriend shot at the police, thinking they were intruders. While he was fully entitled to do that, the NYT doesn’t believe in gun rights so that’s a messy fact. To make the victim seem more sympathetic, the narrative under…

> Were they not supposed to shoot back when Taylor’s boyfriend shot at them? How about: they should be held responsible for the preventable death of this woman in a situation they directly and deliberately created? Is that not the problem? I don't think anyone is demanding a first degree murder conviction here. They didn't walk in with the intent to kill her. But they sure as shit did kill her, and it's all their fau…

People never talk about the judge in these cases. This only happened because a judge decided to sign a no-knock warrant. So, ultimately, doesn’t the judge bear a large portion of the responsibility for creating the situation, for the death that resulted? Shouldn’t the judge be the adult in the room, saying “no” to the police, saying that the circumstances are not extraordinary enough to justify the issuance of a no-knock, with the clear risk to life that this entails, and telling them to find another way?

Re: Breonna Taylor case: Louisville police nearly blank incident report

#177
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

based on 2015 data it's closer to 30% - https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed

I don't see that on this page. I see "police killed at least 104 unarmed black people in 2015", and "unarmed black people were killed at 5x the rate of unarmed whites in 2015". So I think that makes around 125-130 unarmed people killed by police. [1] says that there were 1,134 people killed that year by police. 125/1134 = 11% [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/31/the-counted-...

Next point under the 104 figure "36% of unarmed people killed by police were black in 2015" 36% is 104, 100% is 289

Re: Breonna Taylor case: Louisville police nearly blank incident report

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're trying to imply something that's contrary to his statement, literally right there in the bit you quoted: > disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers

That's offered as motivation but you're claiming it as effect and that ain't how the universe works. Suppose I tell you that my motivation for recompiling the new version of the software only as a 64-bit binary was to improve compatibility with 32-bit systems. Do you feel like that's compelling? Is the effect that now it doesn't work on 32-bit systems at all an unexpected consequence I just could not have foreseen? O…

I think the effect would be good: the military would handle the situation better and fewer people would get hurt. They're used to operating in hostile situations under restrictive rules of engagement, they aren't the people being protested against, and people who've seen combat wouldn't find thrill or threat in a confrontation with unarmed protestors.

In other words, I think your final paragraph is a false dilemma based on an unsupported assumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

Re: Breonna Taylor case: Louisville police nearly blank incident report

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine a scenario where I think many objective individuals would agree a no-knock warrant would make sense, so I can agree that they might be useful. There is a danger in this tabula rasa sort of thinking. If we think only of imaginary scenarios and "in theory this is how it works", we're likely to ignore the very real consequences of this awful practice. Ms Taylor isn't the first person to die in this situati…

Great comment. Ending prohibition would drastically alleviate so many problems. Not just in the US, but in the whole Western hemisphere. And with almost no downside, since it doesn't even fucking work to begin with.

Came here for this thread. The whole incident rests on top of a chain of policy consequences which shouldn't exist, for either Constitutional or moral reasons. The way to fix this insanity, and alleviate a LOT of the issues which are currently being debated, is to somehow elect a group of representatives that don't START with the assumption that the "War on Drugs" is necessary in the first place.

Re: Breonna Taylor case: Louisville police nearly blank incident report

#180
post #75
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask why? I assume this is because many people think it is better that a left-leaning newspaper doesn't publish right-wing opinion pieces, but I would think that this creates a "bubble" and prevents readers from challenging their own opinions. A reduced version of this question would be: if Hitler/Xi/Kim were to publish an opinion piece in NYT, should they reject it or should they publish it?

Vox actually covers this really well https://www.vox.com/2020/6/5/21280425/new-york-times-tom-cot... Basically it boils down to: * it was a fairly dangerous opinion with fabrications that weren’t vetted by the editorial team * it was disrespectful and dangerous to the safety of their employees of color. The safety of people should not be a partisan issue * it compromised the reporting abilities of other arms of the N…

What I found fascinating in this story is that NYT claims with a straight face that the respective piece is dangerous specifically to their employees of color. I can see how one can hyperventilate 'military in the streets' to 'military shooting live ammunition indiscriminately into masses of peaceful protestors', and I can see how they'd imagine their brave reporters being in the front lines to keep us informed, but I just can't imagine the thought process behind 'and the bullets avoid white / asian NYT reporters and crew members and specifically target the ones with melanin above a certain level'.
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