The protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder are currently tapering off, but I don’t see any evidence at all that substantive changes have been made, which means that this is all going to happen again, and soon, and the protests will be bigger, the police response more violent. The black lives matter organization in my city presented a list of demands to the city council and every one of them was ignored, instead the council promised sensitivity training. This is nowhere close to over.
My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
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Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most Officer on the job injury and death comes from traffic accidents. Driving all day is dangerous. We should log Police Officer hours the same way we do truck drivers.
I thought "accident" when I read that comment first, but on reading it again: "sidewalk to strike an unarmed black man on a bicycle head on." So... "to strike" this wasn't an accident?
Not an accident. He waited for the guy on the bike to come around a corner, then gunned the gas hard, crossed over the double solid line and drove up onto the sidewalk to hit the guy.
Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, that 's weird. It doesn't entirely come as a surprise that they would have an international arm, since they are home to the UN and were the most visible target of the most prominent international terrorist attack. But having that money come anonymously... that's suspicious.
Still weird. The FBI and the rest of our national security apparatus exist to deal with those issues.
The "anonymous donor overseas placement" system is clearly a means to launder bribe money into holidays for officers. Anonymous "donations" to police are so obviously corrupt they might as well hang up a sign.
Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
#34Why is "Black" capitalized, but "white" is not?
“For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.” https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php
Kafkaesque
Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
#35Why is "Black" capitalized, but "white" is not?
“For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.” https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php
Well I'm going to capitalize Brown but not white or black. This is the world we live in now, I guess!
Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
#36I've lived here a long time and come to the realization through observation that the NYPD operates like a private security force for capital. Their primary concern is to defend private property, the people themselves come second. The "community outreach" they do is just enough to keep us from getting accusatory.
Most police in the world works like this. The only exception to this rule is countries like Japan, Switzerland and Singapore. In those countries, as a working class citizen you can rely on the police to make sure to keep monopoly on violence and keep you safe, when they fail to do so, they will at least bring some level of justice to whoever did you wrong - though less in Switzerland than I'd like. At least the US of…
It's sure worth handing guns to everyone for defense. If everyone is armed that really makes the world a safer place. How else could you e.g shoot somebody to defend your parking spot? /s
But seriously.. do you have been to Europe? You need to visit some very extreme areas to be in real danger. What you describe is pure hyperbole.
Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
#37It's crazy but from a European perspective, stories like this sound more like what I imagine police forces to behave like in dictatorships, not in a democracy.
After living in Europe for six years now, my wife is still puzzled sometimes by the differences between Europe and North-America when it comes to the police: how they are experienced by the population and how they see and present themselves and which role they think they're playing in society. Big difference. I'm certainly over-generalizing but here, we see cops as approachable and helpful in general (with exceptions) while in North-America, at least my wife's impression is that of cops being mostly intimidating (again, with exceptions).
Of course, this is all complex and different social and societal aspects play a big role, such as e.g., the odds for a cop of running into an armed person. But when I read how the police handled the situation with the group of black trick-or-treaters, it seems so foreign to me now from a more European perspective.
I suppose accountability is always going to be an issue - who watches the watchmen? But it should not be - in a democracy especially, there should be functioning mechanism to prevent abuse of power, and that of course applies to police actions, too.
Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
#38This is why we need civilian oversight of every police department. Cops are generally too corrupt and/or too incompetent to investigate their own. They've proven their inability to hold themselves accountable for their actions, so it's up to the rest of us to do it.
Or we could abolish the police and create a new public safety department without the structural racism and ingrained power-hungry culture.
I don't understand why you are being downvoted.
The point of abolishing police isn't so that nobody shows up when you call 911. It's so that the right person for the right situation shows up when you call 911.
Given the current state of American policing, there is only one situation where I would call the police, and expect the right person to show up.
That situation is an active shooter. For nearly everything else, I don't need an armed-to-the-teeth, compliance-at-gunpoint, qualified-immunity-protected man with a gun to show up. He is not the right person for 99% of the work the police currently engage in.
Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
#39I keep seeing this narrative where people say, "We need law enforcement to prevent crimes, we can't defund the police." And I 100% agree, we need law enforcement. But the police aren't law enforcement if they refuse to enforce the laws.
Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
#40This is why we need civilian oversight of every police department. Cops are generally too corrupt and/or too incompetent to investigate their own. They've proven their inability to hold themselves accountable for their actions, so it's up to the rest of us to do it.
Or we could abolish the police and create a new public safety department without the structural racism and ingrained power-hungry culture.
What would such a new public safety department be and how would it differ from police? What would such a department do differently in the circumstance of failure to follow lawful orders and how would it have no systemic racism?