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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

#481

If there ever was a case of "don't comment unless you've RTFA" this it: people extrapolating their viewpoint on a list of 700 things from watching 1, 2, 3 ... At a minimum, watch 100 videos. I did last night, only took about an hour, it's easy to find some to nitpick, some which are ambiguous ... and plenty that are totally horrifying. If you can watch 100 videos in a row from Greg Doucette's list and say, "the milit…

I’ve reached the point where the problem is more than just the equipment, it’s the culture. There are way too many cases where a cop provokes a confrontation, often by stopping to allow someone else nearby to run into them, and every other cop in the group responds by beating anyone nearby and shoving back anyone with a camera. You don’t get coordinated responses like that without planning and practice.

"You don’t get coordinated responses like that without planning and practice."

I disagree. That's what makes this so much more difficult. If it required planning and practice, we could find the meeting place and itinerary and correct it.

This is much more subtle. This is the kind of thing you can get when you group like minded individuals together and give them power. Without directly orchestrating, they pick up cues and work together.

It's like when a company hires a new person and there's no rule explicitly saying they have to work overtime, but they see everyone else doing it and soon they are too.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#482

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…

Expect the push for more funding of the police to be the eventual narrative. This is to allow for more training and putting more officers where they are needed. Simply put, the defund the police slogans are damaging to the DNC outlooks in November and three major unions basically read the riot act to the DNC and members in Congress that no talk that can come back to collective bargaining being a reason police get awa…

"We do bad job, give us more money." doesn't sound like a good incentive, though.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#483
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many police are killed in Switzerland per year?

What's your argument here ? Police brutality is ok because US police officers are more prone to being killed ? By now there are thousands of videos clearly showing people not resisting, sometimes not even participating in any crime, being beaten and/or killed by the police, it's not normal and no one should defend that. Gun violence in the US is the symptom of very deep problems, you can't consider it just by itself…

No one said that police brutality is OK, just that it can be partially explained by the fact that police in the US are more likely to be killed than in other countries.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#484
post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that the study participants interact; it’s misleading to compare nations by the stat. The extent to which China is a military superpower interplays with other participants.

> The point is that the study participants interact; it’s misleading to compare nations by the stat. So what though? Do European countries like the UK (that are usually with the US when it's time to bomb somebody in the Middle East) outsource their domestic violence? Really, you need to provide some evidence for "we have less crime, less murders, less police violence because the US has more". "The US has more income…

Yes, my belief is that 1) nations outsource violence to the superpower 2) the superpower’s military prowess comes at the cost of a warlike culture at home.

Your belief is (?) that the US aggregate violence/whatever is in no meaningful way confounded with the levels you measure in (say) EU nations: any confounding is small enough to make no difference?

We have a population of 200 (nations) of very diverse size and age, all related by historic and present competition and cooperation. Is there any fair shot at comparing apples to apples?

What sort of “evidence” would you reasonably concede to?

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#485
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Why unexpected? The Last Airbender is as mainstream as NCIS today.

Given that TV ratings and audiences are easy to discover, it's weird you'd make this easily disprovable assertion.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#486

From what I understand, all of these people are breaking curfew and ignoring instructions to leave the area, and in some cases are acting belligerent when confronted, and this is happening at scale. Is the expectation that curfew is an order that should not be enforced in the strictest sense? From what I could see on the news, parts of your country were being burned down and looted by some rogue elements who used the…

>In my country I would want the police to beat the ever loving expletive out of people who do go out in large crowds during a pandemic.

Maybe in your country blind, extrajudicial violence is not a no-no. This is not the case in democratic countries.

>To protect the lives and livelihoods of those affected, a curfew was imposed, which was then violated.

This is a) a slippery slope (a corrupt government would declare a curfew every time it wanted to stop protests) and, b) it prioritizes material wealth over a movement that wants to achieve social change (in the grand scheme of things, decreasing racism is much more valuable that the stores of some neighborhoods).

>Under no circumstances can I be convinced that looting and rioting is an acceptable outcome.

Really? Under no circumstances? Social equality movements have produced riots since time immemorial. Do you denounce the acts of Spartacus? The peasants revolt? The French revolution?

People who claim this are usually ignorant about how social change is made.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#487
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.

That's one in 30 being arrested in the US every year. How does that compare to other countries? Is that something that could be improved? It sounds like a lot .

Given that's not going to be evenly distributed, there will be a chunk of people who are never arrested in their lives and another group of people who get arrested all the time.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#488
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in EU (where, generally, the police is trained to minimize-harm, rather than take-control-by-all-means), and I feel a bit the same about this list; a sizeable share of those videos show regular-ish riot control techniques IMO (pushing the crowd down the street etc.). Then, many show police overreaction or outright brutality. But, then, why mix all of those in one big list and call them simply 'brutality'? As m…

I also live in the EU and sometimes I get annoyed by how soft our police are. I've seen multiple officers unable to take down one violent criminal. Why is there not hand to hand training and strength training? With proper training surely they could do it cleanly without injuring the perp. I've seen (videos of) cops just walking away from armed criminals, letting them rob a store then tracking them down 6 months later…

I think for the same reason you see high-speed chasedowns in the US, and you don't really see that in Europe. The risks involved in catching that perp are significantly higher than simply arresting them later. (Both risk economically, as well as risk to human lives).

I think they should focus on demilitarising the police in the US, with that you also reduce the funding of the police. As a lot of the money goes into buying military-grade equipment. I really don't know why the police needs a tank (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militarization_of_police)

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#489
post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And this is quite the opposite of the current “defund the police” initiative. We actually need to fund them more to get the above to happen.

I think people are sick of departments getting more funds and buying mine protected vehicles instead of sending officers to deescalation refresher classes.

Most of those military vehicles are actually extremely cheap, they are given to the police by the military when the military no longer needs them. I think this was partially as a response to the north Hollywood shooting, where two bank robbers outgunned the police and injured a couple dozen officers and civilians before being killed.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#490
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in EU (where, generally, the police is trained to minimize-harm, rather than take-control-by-all-means), and I feel a bit the same about this list; a sizeable share of those videos show regular-ish riot control techniques IMO (pushing the crowd down the street etc.). Then, many show police overreaction or outright brutality. But, then, why mix all of those in one big list and call them simply 'brutality'? As m…

I also live in the EU and sometimes I get annoyed by how soft our police are. I've seen multiple officers unable to take down one violent criminal. Why is there not hand to hand training and strength training? With proper training surely they could do it cleanly without injuring the perp. I've seen (videos of) cops just walking away from armed criminals, letting them rob a store then tracking them down 6 months later…

Sure, with brute force you can take a suspect, usually the decision whther or not a person is a criminal is up to the courts. The reason why European police aren't doing that, is exactly that brutality. They simply try to not hurt or seriously injure a person.

I know a couple of police officers, funny enough from martial arts training (kickboxing, BJJ and so on). These guys can take a person down all by themselves, sure. But at the risk of serious injuriy. This kind of brutality is exactly what peple are demonstrating against.

Als, IMHO, this whole "everyone is carrying a gun" narrative is a little bit lazy. Sure, the US has a gun issue. But just throwing it out there, is just a means to justify police brutality and use of deadly force. If there is such a problem with guns, there are couple of ways to deal with it:

- stricter laws (seems to be dificult)

- specific and adequat police training to deal with it. That explicitly means to not shoot first

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