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George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

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Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#191

The fact that is even possible is insane. Imagine there being over 700 videos of pilots messing up in one month, 700 crane operator mishaps in a month, 700+ food poising by a chain in a month. The also imagine you believe there's no problem. This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people.

>This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people. A reference I never expected to see on HN. It's insane, but then you realize that a significant portion of the US population _still_ only watches television news media and refuses to spend extra time looking at other sources, like Twitter.

Neither you or the parent poster explained what "Ba Sing Se" is. I quickly discovered that it is a reference to a city in "The last Airbender" [0].

I don't want to watch three seasons of it just to understand the reference. A very obscure reference might deserve an explanation to make the remaining 99.9% of the readers able to understand what you mean.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar:_The_Last_Airbender#Ba_...

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#192

The thing that really makes things worse is that the police are causing most of these protests and riots with their violent, unwarranted behavior. This triggers riots and protests, which require the police to work overtime. They get paid for causing all these problems, and well paid. Their overtime costs must be tremendous. And who ends up paying? We do. We should claw back police overtime pay for any protests or rio…

Over the last week I have been starting to realize that what you said is true in general, and not just of protests. It seems that police inflame and instigate most of the violent situations they are involved in. We are literally paying to be abused. We shouldn't be trying to get that money back; we shouldn't even be paying it in the first place.

A 2500-year-old quote still relevant today:

"When a nation hoards weapons, troubles arise from within and from without.

When its leaders try to be cunning and clever, the situation spins further out of control.

When they try to fix things by passing more laws, they only increase the number of outlaws."

民多利器、國家滋昏。

人多伎巧、奇物滋起。

法令滋彰、盜賊多有。

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#193

It's worth noting hundreds of police officers lose their life a year in the line of duty: https://www.odmp.org/search/year and many more than that receive serious injuries, even permanent spinal damage: One cop was paralyzed from the neck down in Vegas protests: https://www.bostonherald.com/2020/06/14/police-officer-shot-... Retired police chief killed at 77 by looters in St. Louis: https://thehill.com/homenews/state…

It's not clear to me why "Policing is dangerous" means things like strangling handcuffed prisoners, raping detainees, attacking journalists and peaceful protestors, and stealing cash and other valuables (i.e. civil forfeiture) and so on have to be tolerated. None of these are "split second life or death decisions".

Just as crimes against police are more serious than crimes against civilians (rightly, IMO), crimes by police should also be more serious.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#194

The fact that is even possible is insane. Imagine there being over 700 videos of pilots messing up in one month, 700 crane operator mishaps in a month, 700+ food poising by a chain in a month. The also imagine you believe there's no problem. This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people.

[deleted]

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#195
post #172

There are lots and lots of mishaps in many professions, sometimes with deadly consequences. The United States is a country of 330 million people. Suppose an event is so unlikely it only has 1 in a billion chance of happening--it will happen once ever 4 days on average! Medical errors, for example, are estimated to cause as many as 250,000 deaths per year [1]. There are millions and millions of daily interactions betw…

That medical error study is awful. It categorizes any treatment that is given but doesn't work as an error. That only makes sense in a world in which a correct treatment that could cure a patient always exists and that correct option should be known ahead of time by the people treating the patient. Reality doesn't work like that. Here[1] is a write up on the issues in that study. [1] - https://www.statnews.com/2016/0…

Sure, I think that's fair enough. I didn't mean to imply that there are 250,000 cases a year where a heart transplant is performed to cure pneumonia.

But of those 250,000, some will be small mistake, and some will be epic fuck ups (see [1]).

Similarly, the police shoot around 1,000 people per year. Of those, many are justified, some are are questionable, and a few are epic fuck ups. If you just look at the epic fuck ups, you may believe that policing is completely broken in America. If you look at it in context, you'd probably conclude that the system works well in some cases, not well in other cases, and that there are lots of tradeoffs and no easy answer.

I'd recommend Peter Moskos's blog and podcast (www.copinthehood.com and www.qualitypolicing.com) to get a more even handed perspective than you'd find in the media. I'm not defending every single police shooting, but I think the recent shift in public opinion is not based on a good understanding of policing in America.

[1] https://www.mdlinx.com/article/jaw-dropping-medical-mix-ups/...

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#196
post #3

It would be good to stick these videos somewhere where they can't be taken down.

This repo (linked in this spreadsheet) has both a similar listing + a downloader tool here:

https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/tree/master/tools...

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#197
post #112
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mods didn't touch this post, or see it, until I turned the flags off just now.

Got it, thanks. Since that's that's been a big trend recently, is there anything that can be done to make sure posts like these don't just immediately get flagged into oblivion? I can absolutely see campaigns against HN that flag these sorts of posts to get off the front page. Not expecting the answer to be yes, but figured I'd ask.

Users can't flag unless they have reached a certain threshold in karma so I doubt there's a campaign going on.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Policing is not a dangerous job. According to the FBI, which publishes the data in the Uniform Crime Reports, from 1980–2018, an average of 85 law enforcement officers were feloniously killed per year. In 2018 there were 686,665 police in the US.

That's only a function of how good they are at what they do. They have to engage in over 10 million incidents a year. Any one of those could be a routine traffic stop that suddenly turns into a gang bust and an attempt is made on their own life. They don't have the luxury of foresight of knowing if they're coming home today or not. They know they're a target. Contrast that with your average aeron chair programmer and…

Pizza delivery drivers have to deliver over 10 million pizzas a year. Any one of those deliveries could be cut short by a drunk driver that causes a head-on collision at 60 miles per hour. They don't have the luxury of foresight of knowing if they're coming home today or not. They know they're at risk. Contrast that with your average cop issuing citations and filling out paperwork and I'd say their job is incredibly fucking dangerous.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#199
post #103
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair you are comparing an adversarial job with a cooperative one. A crane operator won't feel unsafe, or confronted by someone he calls hostile. This is no excuse whatsoever for the multitude of outraging problems in the system, but the comparison isn't straightforward.

Quite the opposite. The adversarial job should have higher standards of conduct, not lower.

But the comment wasn't saying the behaviour is fine, just that the job is more likely to produce this sort of content.

Even countries with less violent police corps often have episodes like this.

To keep it out of political rallies, just think of police vs hooligans in Europe.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#200
post #3

It would be good to stick these videos somewhere where they can't be taken down.

This seems like the perfect place to use InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) ( https://ipfs.io/ ). You can store and distribute files (including videos) using IPFS without worrying that someone could remove them. The only thing missing is a "UTube" front-end, and I'm not completely certain that there isn't already such a thing. Maybe this type of project would be the thing that gets IPFS off the ground and exposing it…

This repo has a tool that supports IPFS!

https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/tree/master/tools...

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