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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

#371

Post by lazyjones »

TeaDrunk wrote: post #113
tsurkoprt wrote: post #83

Can we stop with this BS about police brutality, perhaps we should be more vocal for the criminal's brutality? Which would limit the need of police in the first place? There are more than 350M interactions of police with citizens in a year, and you found 400 videos - most of them questionable in the definition of brutality. How about thousands of police officers killed that are protecting us? Here is the latest case…

Thousands of police officers are not killed actually, their jobs are actually not even the 10 most dangerous jobs in America. As a black man you are more likely to be killed by a cop than it is likely a cop dies in the line of duty (ftr around 1 in every 1000 black men and boys are expected to be killed by police. In 2019 there are over 600,000 law enforcement officers but the Officer Down statistic lists 106 deaths.…

> As a black man you are more likely to be killed by a cop than it is likely a cop dies in the line of duty

Same goes for criminals. And this is the mistake in your argumentation. Around 2.2% of black men were imprisoned in 2018 in the US (https://www.statista.com/statistics/252871/imprisonment-rate...). It's not per se outrageous that 5% or so of criminals die in the hands of the police, in a country with major social issues and easy access to dangerous weapons. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#372

Post by esperent »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #351
esperent wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there a term for the type of response that, instead of furthering the discussion, just tries to overwhelm you with questions?

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#373

Post by cyberdrunk »

rantanplan wrote: post #349
cyberdrunk wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend the latest Sam Harris podcast on this subject, he makes a ton of nuanced points that many people miss when talking about "police brutality".

As Noam Chomsky said, when asked about what he believes about people considering Sam Harris as an intellectual: "Unfortunately we get the intellectuals we deserve".

I'm not neccessarily considering him an intellectual, I just find the points he makes about the instinctual reaction to be outraged compelling (and pretty common sense). What he's saying on the subject is not deep, but the current discourse is so off the rails that we need someone to pause and talk about the basics (realities of arrests, police violence statistics, how people interpret videos etc.)

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#374

Post by CathedralBorrow »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #26

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…

> If you want to create a list for this cause, at least make it good, make it solid. Don't fill it with random junk to inflate the numbers.

What I read is: If you want to create a list for this cause, at least make it perfect and unassailable in every possible way. Because I only need to point skeptically at one thing to dismiss the whole lot.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#375

Post by dragontamer »

dtech wrote: post #316
bnjms wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“There is no war in ba sing se” is the equivalent of the older phrase “we were never at war with Eurasia”. Which is now more obscure but likely better understood on HN. OP is saying you’d need to be incredibly delusional to deny police are brutal and there’s a problem.

With all due respect, 1984 has a much higher cultural impact and awareness than ATLA. The show isn't that well known outside of current 20-30 year olds.

Frankly... among my generation of roughly 30 year olds, I'd expect Avatar the Last Airbender to have higher cultural impact than 1984 (which was written in 1949).

Most of us were forced to read 1984 and didn't really enjoy it. ATLA however, is something that we organically grew up with through high-school / college and actually paid attention to.

My group of friends would be aware of 1984 concepts... such as "Big Brother is Watching" (phrases / concepts which have escaped the book and become a thing of their own). But I don't think we'd recognize the phrase "At War with Eurasia".

Honestly, the only reason why I remember "At War with Eurasia" is because I was a quiz-bowl player and was forced to memorize key phrases from many books I barely read. Even if I did read 1984 in my high school classes, it never actually stuck with me.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#376

Post by raxxorrax »

onion2k wrote: post #335
raxxorrax wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I profoundly disagree with that definition. Racism needs animosity and distrust doesn't qualify as that. You can make a case that this is the accepted academic nomenclature but I would add that the reasoning behind it is not very sophisticated. I would argue that it could even elevate racial tensions if applied to practical problems. Even beyond factoring in the common scholar diagnosing racism in everything.

Racism needs animosity and distrust doesn't qualify as that. Systemic racism doesn't need animosity for it to happen. Systemic racism is a term for how a system discriminates against race - that might be something like defining how much to spend on schools based on the taxable income of residents. That's not "racist" in the sense that someone deliberately decided to give people of color get less resources, but the ou…

Then why draw the line on race? That just leads to divide and conquer between the poorest of a nation. Because

> that might be something like defining how much to spend on schools based on the taxable income of residents.

is purely economic discrimination. Frankly, I think the recent redefinition is lacking.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#377

Post by DanBC »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #26

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…

> Which isn't an example of police brutality.

Tear-gassing a crowd is police brutality. It'd be illegal to use tear gas in warfare; many police departments around the world have banned tear gas.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#378

Post by tosers4 »

tsherr wrote: post #364
aaron695 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that is even possible is insane. Imagine there being over 700 videos of pilots messing up in one month, You would easily get this from doctors in one month if they were filmed. Considerably more in fact. Some studies say medical errors contribute to more than 250,000 deaths per year or even more. That's just deaths, not maiming.

There's a significant difference between making a mistake and shooting someone in the back or choking him to death.

Those can be mistakes as well.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#379

Post by bilegeek »

esperent wrote: post #372
bufferoverflow wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there a term for the type of response that, instead of furthering the discussion, just tries to overwhelm you with questions?

Gish gallop[1]? Although that includes arguments, not just questions.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#380

Post by pjc50 »

dragontamer wrote: post #369
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a complete outsider to US reality, to me looking in, it seems like there is a real issue of training regarding de-escalating techniques. US police forces seem to have a very short training which, as far as I understand is not centrally vetted by any federal organism? And considering the short training time it seems to be mostly focused on tactical and firearm training. Compare that with European forces and you see…

Yes and no. IMO, the issue is that the US Police are not one organization. There are over 10,000 police departments in America. In some towns, the Sheriff + Deputies are less than 10 people. Some towns have a Sheriff who is democratically elected. This leads to massive lack of accountability, because there's no chance the Sheriff could be fired before the next election. Under such a system, why would a Sheriff, or th…

Washington DC is unusual because it's not a state, and in practice it's the only place where the President can order the police about directly.

You would expect directly elected police to increase accountability, but the question as always is: to whom? If the local electorate is racist, they're going to support racist violence from the police.

The very large number of police organisations produces some stupidities, like a tiny "city" that's mostly funded by stopping people going 1 mile over the speed limit on the nearby highway, but almost all the big problems are the big unitary police forces of the big cities: New York, Chicago, LA, etc.

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