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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

#641

When one 737 Max crashed, some pointed the finger at the pilots. When a second one crashed, the focus quickly shifted. It is a common attitude in aviation that even pilot error is really a systems fault. Perhaps opposing buttons are too close together, or some control requires attention to be diverted at the wrong time, or pilots are allowed to fly too many hours without adequate rest, or plenty of other things that…

I think you are comparing apples to oranges. Your comparison would be more accurate if all humans were law abiding citizens. I don't think you could put blame on pilots if airplanes could sabotage flights at will.

Of course if all humans are law abiding citizens there would be no issue to begin with. I think every society with lower crime has significantly smaller police brutality issue with some rare exceptions like Hong Kong.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#642

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…

>You could watch 100 videos of disgusting malpractices in restaurant kitchens and begin to think you should never eat in a restaurant again.

If you did that, and then decided we needed either better laws concerning food safety, or better enforcement of existing laws... where is the logical issue? If someone was to make the argument that a certain tolerance of bad food handling is to be allowed, then we would need to know the rate to know if we needed to make changes, but if the view point is that no restaurant should be engaging in that behavior then I don't particularly see the issue.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police unions have considerable influence to block reform even when the elected politicians support it: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/police-unions-minneapo... The efforts to "defund police" would solve some of the same problems that police currently address through other means. This would weaken the influence of police unions. For example, spending more to treat drug addiction as a disease rather than paying…

Instead of "defund", maybe a better word, then, is "reform", or "reorganize"? Or maybe define that it is "police unions" who should be defunded, not the entire bucket called "police"? I am just curious at this choice of word that seems to be the clarion call, which means entirely different in the dictionary than what is being implied! :-/

No because the goal is to have public safety organizations that don't have any of the personnel, historical lineage or goals of the police. By poor analogy, the goal isn't to clone facebook its to make a twitter,Instagram,telegram,etc. Different orgs with different goals with different people ultimately focused on public safety.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#644
post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe "the right not to be prosecuted for a victimless crime" should be an amendment. Then homelessness/drugs-whatevers/prostitution can no longer have laws against them. "Address the root cause", exactly, and the root cause is the unjust laws. Though cops pretty much never being found guilty for unjust use of violence is a big one too, and I wonder what law changes can solve that issue.

The problem is the notion of victimless. There are crimes that put people at risk but don't always create a victim. Do we allow for crimes that have a risk of a victim even if there isn't a direct victim? There are crimes where we say that someone is a victim despite their own feelings of being victimized or having suffered a crime. Do those stay as well? We have crimes where there isn't someone physically hurt and n…

To most of these I'd say: make 'm offenses not crimes. As I see it: crimes make it punishable by jail time, offenses not.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#645
post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My overarching point here is that it’s pointless to debate Switzerland v Germany as if they exist in some sort of vacuum without interaction. Without Germany, there is no Switzerland. Without Switzerland, there is not Germany.

A theory where every nation is a data point can’t get you anywhere. All the nations interact meaning we should reason about the system as a whole.

I say something about a nation, you expect me to back it up with other nations. But there are very few data points, and they are interconnected, and the problem has a huge number of dimensions.

It’s like I claim opposable thumbs are good for tool making and you ask me to show five other body parts where that applies.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#646
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean? Is there a legal definition of "mainstream"? The Last Airbender is topping the charts on Netflix. That surely must be enough for me to be allowed to call it mainstream and that a reference to it is not obscure.

If you read the sibling comments they are trying to say NCIS is not mainstream at all since TV ratings mean nothing, making the opposite point of yours. You guys are impossible.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#647
post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be stupid. No restaurant reform can prevent employees from doing something bad, unless you want to mandate robotic "employees". The sane way to react to such videos would be to confront the employers, using a lawsuit if necessary, so they can fix the situation. All required laws already exist AFAICT.

> No restaurant reform can prevent employees from doing something bad, unless you want to mandate robotic "employees". No of course not, but there are measures you can take to reduce bad practices, which is why we do those measures for restaurants! Let's make police accountable for their crimes the same way we make restaurant owners and employees accountable for e.g. food safety issues.

as someone who used to work in a restaurant, I would really want the police to be more accountable than a restaurant owner or employee.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just watched the first video. "protester stepped into the horse's way without looking in that direction, nobody's fault". This is clearly not true.

And what is your interpretation of the video then?

I don't believe you are asking in good faith. I am not going to engage with you on this. I am just responding so that other people actually watch the video rather than listen to your spin on it.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point is that "black on black violence" is essentially a myth. If crime was responsible for the elevated rate of homicide among black people you would expect a higher proportion of strangers killing each other. All those intraracial homicides are essentially familial, and indeed when you control for household crowding the difference between white and black murder rates completely disappears[1]. You don't even need to control for economic circumstances, merely the number of people living together predicts the murder rate independent of race.

Despite the fact that black people are no more dangerous than white people who live in the same areas, black people are subject to massively disproportional violence inflicted by the state.

The thing that should really make you pause and consider your assumptions is this: Black Americans are more likely to be killed by a police officer than a criminal.

[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7769768/

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s both. Some police officers study “killology” and “how to be a predator” way more than de-escalation.
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