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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

#531

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

luckylion wrote: post #320
baddox wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we actually have data on this. Traffic stops are not particularly dangerous for police in the United States. There are laws in place about how legal gun owners must notify law enforcement during traffic stops. In fact, there is no shortage of video of law-abiding citizens in the US notifying law enforcement that they have a legal firearm in the vehicle and receiving a disproportionate response. But you don’t even…

> There are laws in place about how legal gun owners must notify law enforcement during traffic stops. Isn't the issue with laws that those breaking them don't usually care about laws? I'm sure you have laws in place against murder, and murder still happens. "But there's a law against burglary, why would you want additional protection and have a strong door" isn't a good argument. There are good arguments (and the wh…

It doesn't matter about the law, it matters that traffic stops aren't particularly dangerous. So the gun serves as elephant repellent in Manhattan.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#532

Post by meheleventyone »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #495
meheleventyone wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With use of force it doesn't matter if the techniques were ones we're used to it matters whether they are warranted by the situation. One isn't usually obliged to push crowds down the street. Using correct technique in the wrong situation is just as bad as using excessive force when using force is warranted.

But it's impossible to tell, from just a video of a crowd being pushed down the street, whether or not there's a good reason they need to be moved.

Then one shouldn't leap to conclusions in either direction until more context can be found. Like for example the ample less ambiguous evidence.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#533

Post by craftinator »

pjc50 wrote: post #440
peterwwillis wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we begin with the fact that this isn't even remotely in the same universe as a peer reviewed study? There's nothing to compare it to, there's no data on what the timeline is, there's no meta analysis of the different cases, what sparked the incidents, the outcomes, or how often non-violent confrontations or de-escalations happen, etc. Basically you're looking at a single specific dataset, like "number of children…

> "number of children strangled" At least in that case you wouldn't have people arguing that the kids deserved it. > Horror porn is not an intellectual argument. This isn't porn, this is filming reality as it happens. I know we're all a bit numbed, but this reminds me of the decisions by the Allied forces to document Auschwitz as well as possible when it was overrun, or how the BBC footage of the Ethiopian famine spa…

> At least in that case you wouldn't have people arguing that the kids deserved it.

Damn. Well that's the best rebuttle I'm going to see this week.

> This isn't porn, this is filming reality as it happens. I know we're all a bit numbed, but this reminds me of the decisions by the Allied forces to document Auschwitz as well as possible when it was overrun, or how the BBC footage of the Ethiopian famine sparked Live Aid. The act of filming has a habit of cutting through all the pseudo-intellectual bullshit from those arguing in favour of the brutality.

To add to this sentiment; this is literally what's going on in the USA right now. Obviously it isn't every cop in every city, or protesters would be exercising their 2nd amendment rights en masse. But these actions documented here are inarguably immoral, and IF they are legal, the law needs to be changed immediately. It's absolutely disgusting, and if seeing these videos of police brutality doesn't invoke that feeling in you, take some time to imagine it's you or your loved one getting beaten, maced, tear gassed. These forms of crowd control are immensely painful, pain that a lot of us have never felt, and they leave lasting damage.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#534

Post by downerending »

hwillis wrote: post #445
growlist wrote: post #426

Is it true that black on black violence kills massively greater numbers than the police?

One-third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by police. If you are black, you're more likely to be killed by a police officer than someone whos name you don't know. https://granta.com/violence-in-blue/

Neither of those stats means anything without context. Not surprisingly, criminals get killed a lot.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#535

Post by luckylion »

jpttsn wrote: post #484
luckylion wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

But that only works for super powers? Why is there no trend visible for countries like Switzerland who are traditionally neutral and never fight wars with neighboring countries like France who or Germany who have a larger active military, do engage in NATO wars etc? Why aren't the Chinese shooting each other on a similar scale? Why weren't the Germans during the early 20th century when they were very militaristic? Why were the US already at similar levels in the first half of the 20th century, before becoming a global super power that others may have "outsourced" their wars to?

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

Minimum requirements: has some sort of rule that allows predictions that can be falsified other than "it's only true in this super specific narrow case of the USA in last 5 decades of human history, but not in any other place or during any other time".

It feels like looking for super complicated reasons that require American Exceptionalism (as in "does not apply to any other country") to explain something that is explained by well-studied phenomena that do not require US citizens to function fundamentally different than other humans in other places or other times.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#536

Post by zepto »

peterwwillis wrote: post #424
kthejoker2 wrote: post #412

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…

Can we begin with the fact that this isn't even remotely in the same universe as a peer reviewed study? There's nothing to compare it to, there's no data on what the timeline is, there's no meta analysis of the different cases, what sparked the incidents, the outcomes, or how often non-violent confrontations or de-escalations happen, etc. Basically you're looking at a single specific dataset, like "number of children…

Sounds like you aren’t sure that this represents a problem, and want a peer reviewed study to prove that to you. Is that correct?

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#537

Post by dragonwriter »

sneak wrote: post #459
dragonwriter wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lawsuit settlements for the police committing human rights abuses should come out of the police pension fund. No, they should come out of taxpayer funds. The principal is responsible for the actions of their agents. If the public authority doesn't properly screen, train, supervise, and discipline police to protect civil rights, it is their responsibility and the responsibility of the public who chooses that authori…

> supervise, and discipline police to protect civil rights I'm pretty sure that that's what I just proposed, by causing the results of supervision and discipline to trigger negative consequences.

Not really. It doesn't create negative consequences for the individual wrongdoers, or even the police collectively except perhaps extremely indirectly. It is symbolic collective punishment, but substantively it's just a way for the public authority to defer its own consequences so they are distant from the problem, since a pension fund is literally just the fund out of which the public authority pays it's pension obligations to retiring police before having to resort to using other funds. Depleting the fund for unrelated purposes doesn't reduce the public authority’s contractual obligations to each retiring officer.

You may be mistakenly assuming that exhausting the pension fund directly cuts pensions for those covered, which would still be remote just in targeted individuals and time, but there is no necessary relationship there. It just makes it more likely that the public authority would be forced to declare bankruptcy because it can't meet it's pension obligations, at which point it might be able to shed pension obligations for employees (not just those covered by the fund, if the police have a distinct fund!) as part of the bankruptcy, but that could happen as a result of direct settlement payments, as well.

In the fairly common case where the police don't even have even have their own pension fund but contribute to a common fund with other employees, perhaps not even from the same local jurisdiction (e.g., California local governments where often both police and other employees are covered by CalPERS), taking it out of the fund would even lack the symbolic sense that it has in the more simple case.

If you want direct liability for the people doing the immediate wrong, you want an end to, or limitations on, qualified immunity, not redirecting public authoriry liability to pension funds. That, of course, would make the public authority not responsible, but to would mean that individual cops would also be responsible on civil suits.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#538

Post by eganist »

piokoch wrote: post #528
kthejoker2 wrote: post #412

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…

As a non American I am not getting this at all. In many US cities/towns sheriff is elected. In all other cases city mayor is elected. How it happens that all those mayors and sheriffs are still in the office if police brutality is such a big issue? Does this mean that people just do not care, or there is only some minority who thinks that the police is too violent and the rest is ok with that?

Voter disenfranchisement and suppression is a pretty big problem here.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/poll-pr...

> Does this mean that people just do not care, or there is only some minority who thinks that the police is too violent and the rest is ok with that?

Yeah, basically. Especially that last part.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#539

Post by lvs »

lazyjones wrote: post #517
kthejoker2 wrote: post #412

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…

This is a clear attempt to manipulate opinion, I don't know why HN leaves it up. You could watch 100 videos of disgusting malpractices in restaurant kitchens and begin to think you should never eat in a restaurant again. If after watching carefully select and cut videos on a Twitter propaganda account you believe the police has a systemic issue, you're falling for the same trap. It's the same way media manipulate you…

I don't think society is looking for police to be an average good. That is, we're not looking to optimize on the statistical mean of police interactions. We are concerned particularly about the tails. The outliers are the problem, particularly when they're not as uncommon as we expect them to be. You may call them propaganda, but that's a strange thing to post on an enumerated list of recorded evidence.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#540

Post by GhostVII »

onion2k wrote: post #241
marcell wrote: post #131

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…

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! I think the issue people are rioting about is that it's not a 1 in a billion chance for everyone. It's more like 1 in a quintillion for a rich white p…

Based on the data, deaths are relatively distributed across the population. 25% of people killed by police are black. They make up 12% of the population, so based on this it seems like they are twice as likely as normal to be killed by the police, but after normalizing for violent crime rates (for a variety of reasons including discrimination, black people commit over 50% of the homicides) police killings seem roughly similar for all races.
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