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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

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that there are more than 400, we know that just by the number of people getting shot. Now, how many are unjustified? That's the important question.

An important question, and a simple answer: all cases of police misconduct and brutality are unjustified.

That's blatantly false.

How do you stop someone pointing a gun at the police officer without brutality?

How do you stop someone attacking a police officer?

How do you stop someone going for their gun?

How do you stop someone going around shooting innocent people?

etc, etc, etc.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de... just under 1000 police involved shootings each year. Can't find the source, but of these only about 47 were un-armed and most of those involved protecting someone else from a physical attack.

Those figures are for fatal police shootings, not for all police shootings. Police shootings and police brutality do not necessarily result in death.

You keep avoiding the question. How many are unjustified?

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#353
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ~10 million arrests per year in the US. That google doc includes non-US cases as well (but is also limited by what’s caught on camera). Still, 0.0007% of arrests leading to a case like this doesn’t seem as horrible as the raw total in isolation.

There is one UK example which is actually a counter example where the police allowed a statue to be destroyed instead of intervening and creating a potentially dangerous altercation.

Oh yeah, we should just let the rioters destroy public property. If the police just didn’t enforce the laws, there’d be no problems!

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#354

Anyone thinks this is just a US issue is mistaken. This is what power does if you really challenge it. The friendly face disappears pretty quick.

I don't think the problem of police brutality is nearly as big in western Europe or other comparable places.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#355
post #342
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the existence of riots have anything to do with these instances of police brutality on _peaceful_ protestors?

Everything is connected to everything. If you have riots everywhere then people, including police, are on the edge. Also, are you suggesting that the riots are peaceful?

> Also, are you suggesting that the riots are peaceful?

So apparently you haven't watched any of the videos, huh?

Guess what? The problem is that police are frequently "on edge" in their normal jobs, and as a result innocent people are seriously injured or die. And worse, police are "on edge" far more around blacks than whites, meaning far more blacks are injured by police than whites.

It doesn't matter what the cause is, it's a problem and is has to stop.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#356

I opened a couple of random ones. The first one was this link: https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1270402748895412224 Which isn't an example of police brutality. The second one was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsTkAOe5UTE Basically a bunch of thugs attack random drivers. One of the thugs jumps into a random car, the car stops, police come, pull the thug out, he resists, they deal with him. I have zero…

> The first one was this link: https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1270402748895412224 Which isn't an example of police brutality.

Did you click through the link that post had? It goes to https://medium.com/@Jeff_Jackson/review-of-incident-in-charl... which is pretty long, but about half way though shows an attack on protesters by police. Search for this:

Here is what it looked, sounded, and felt like from the perspective of the protesters as the second police unit quickly appeared in front of them and detonated tear gas and a flashbang

From then on it goes into a lot of depth about the tactics the police used to trap the crowd, teargas them and shot them with pepperballs.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#357
post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de... just under 1000 police involved shootings each year. Can't find the source, but of these only about 47 were un-armed and most of those involved protecting someone else from a physical attack.

> Can't find the source, but of these only about 47 were un-armed and most of those involved protecting someone else from a physical attack. This is wrong. https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed lists 1ists at least 104 unarmed black people alone killed by police in 2015. I went though the first 20, and maybe 8 could have been accidents (one was hit by a car) or otherwise explained (2 pointed toy guns at police).

First of all, you're pulling old data. Try last year.

But even then, half of the cases sound like accidents, out of 104. The remaining is pretty close to 47.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#359
post #141

I don't see much discussion of root causes here. But a lot of "police ought to be this or that". Perhaps the best solution is to have more democracy or community input into policing. It seems like it's happening now in the US (it would be quite different in other countries, where the police is national and considered civil servants; in France you can't elect sheriffs, and police is beyond the responsibility of mayors…

> a police that's tough

Tough is having courage and compassion while being firm. Tough not being an insecure bully. Please don't use "tough" when relating to US police brutality.

Having a decent police force is a solved problem. Just look around for a country with a decent relationship between population and law enforcements. Look what made that happen (Was it 2-3 year police training? mental health screens? No qualified immunity? Central/federal authority governing all police forces? perrhaps ALL OF THE ABOVE?).

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#360
post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also I've seen it before here not many year ago with comments like "can only compare US to Brazil not any Europen country" Can you explain why you feel that's terribly unfair? I don't know why somebody would pick Brazil specifically, but you might easily say "compare the US to countries with a similar income inequality". Take the gini coefficient for simplicity [1] and compare the US to Côte d'Ivoire, Argentina, Ha…

The rationale for Brazil was explicitly the same one in the dead comment. But yeah, that's pretty radical what you're saying too. Maybe it's fair that you should only compare the richest nation on earth with much poorer developing nations with a short track record of democracy. Not sure I'd agree.

> Not sure I'd agree.

Why? Income inequality is correlated with crime rate, why wouldn't you use that to find comparable countries? Seems useful to me, similarly to comparing diabetes rates in countries with similar levels of obesity, not based on average hair color or amount of trees per square mile.

> the richest nation on earth

You'll need to define what "richest" means, I guess. The highest GDP? Largest military spending? Does that mean a lot to somebody that is poor in the US? Would that person possibly be better off in a European country with public health insurance, a vast social safety net, high welfare etc, even though it's not "the richest country on earth" by your standards?

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