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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

#131

Post by dragonwriter »

trowawee wrote: post #88
eloff wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a tactic commonly used as you say. It's also a relevant statistic here, although all race on black violence would have been even better. It still serves to support the point quite clearly that police are not to be feared as much as criminals, even if you're black. Having said that, a lot of criminal violence happens if you're mixed up in that world or frequenting a bad area as opposed to just random violence. T…

It is completely irrelevant. It's like responding to "It's raining today" with "It was sunny last week". At best, it's a non-sequitur, at worst it's an active attempt to distract from the conversation at hand. And it ignores the facts that A) black-on-black crime does not happen at a substantially higher rate than white-on-white crime, B) the explanation for why most crime is intra-racial in a segregated country is p…

> It is completely irrelevant

It's irrelevant to the real issue, but not to the upthread claim that blacks view police as the greatest threat. In the latter context, it is not irrelevant to point out that such a view does not seem to be in line with the evidence.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#132

Post by danharaj »

jeffbee wrote: post #54
danharaj wrote: post #2

The NYPD has a budget for spying on people in other countries. State power is weird.

Does it also seem weird to you that small countries have intelligence bureaus? Denmark and Finland are both less populous than New York City.

No, because they're countries. Who deals with an international incident caused by the NYPD?

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#133

Post by awinder »

pjc50 wrote: post #22

> “I blame myself,” she kept saying. “I never let him out on Halloween. A bunch of Black boys together. I shouldn’t have let him out. But he begged me.” Notice that while average white parents might worry about criminals before letting their kids out on the street, the black parents worry (with good reason) about the police. (Just to spell it out: this is why so many BLM activists feel comfortable saying "abolish the…

It’s child abuse, but it’s so much worse, which is corrupt child abuse. There’s a multi-office institution which has structured itself to say — hit a kid, make the justification happen. Consider that they’ve got underage kids in the police station without access to parents or lawyers. No charges would ever stick from that, but you sure as hell would cover your ass for that whole running over a kid thing.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#134

Post by dragonwriter »

number364789 wrote: post #129
trowawee wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bringing up "black-on-black crime" is a common disingenuous tactic to distract from conversations about police brutality. Most violence is committed by people you're around, and in an intensely segregated country, that will usually be people that are the same race as you. It's a complete digression from the actual conversation here, which is about agents of the state, entrusted to act as enforcers of the state's mono…

I don't know if this is valid or true, but I sometimes think that the 1990s through early 2000s pop culture depiction of black culture embedded itself strongly in the psyche of many white Americans. It sounds silly to say that gangster rap, and The Wire, and such things are responsible for racial stereotypes, but for many of my white friends, I think this is absolutely true. One sad part of this is that some of the m…

The relevant stereotypes are older than independence and deeply embedded in American culture, they don't stem from 1990s to early 2000s popular culture.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#135

Post by austincheney »

pjc50 wrote: post #22

> “I blame myself,” she kept saying. “I never let him out on Halloween. A bunch of Black boys together. I shouldn’t have let him out. But he begged me.” Notice that while average white parents might worry about criminals before letting their kids out on the street, the black parents worry (with good reason) about the police. (Just to spell it out: this is why so many BLM activists feel comfortable saying "abolish the…

> Notice that while average white parents

Perhaps that distinction is more pronounced in some locations than others. I don’t see this distinction in the big city where I live and each of my neighbors are black. We have regular police patrols where I live and almost no police interventions. We also have several police officers that live in the neighborhood. My city has greater than 900,000 people, is about 60% white, and has doubled in size over the last thirty years.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#136

Post by hanselot »

jfengel wrote: post #27
jfengel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what style guide ProPublica uses, but very recently AP decided to capitalize Black when used as a cultural term when it conveys "essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black". They go on to say that they expect to make a decision soon about whether to do that with "white" as well. https://blog.ap.org/announcements/the-decision-to-capitalize... https://a…

And boy, those must be some fraught discussions. I think of myself as white but not White, because the notion White Culture connotes white supremacy. Black people outside of Africa share a common element of diaspora, at the very least defined in terms of their shared difficulties, while I as a white person in the west define myself more closely with smaller ethnic and national groups than with whiteness as a whole. S…

Have you ever found you had little care left for labels when you realise everyone's neural net is already putting labels on you anyways?

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#137

Post by bJGVygG7MQVF8c »

pjc50 wrote: post #22

> “I blame myself,” she kept saying. “I never let him out on Halloween. A bunch of Black boys together. I shouldn’t have let him out. But he begged me.” Notice that while average white parents might worry about criminals before letting their kids out on the street, the black parents worry (with good reason) about the police. (Just to spell it out: this is why so many BLM activists feel comfortable saying "abolish the…

> Notice that while average white parents might worry about criminals before letting their kids out on the street, the black parents worry (with good reason) about the police.

A minor but significant adjustment:

Average black parents worry about both

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#138

Post by uoaei »

drdec wrote: post #23

We need the police to take care of their own house and stop the us against them mentality. Until they do we won't be able to truly address the events that have led to BLM and the current protests. The problem isn't a few bad apples, it's a culture that allows a few bad apples to expect impunity and protection from the consequences of their actions.

The training regimen for officers sounds like expert-level cult indoctrination.

First they inflate your ego by telling you you're joining a high and noble cause.

Then they tell you that others don't appreciate the noble work you do and they hate you for reasons out of your control. And you just want to do right in the world so that's not fair!

Then they show you every documented instance of when an officer was ambushed and/or killed. This forces you to mentally ostracize yourself from the broader community by instilling a persecution complex.

Then they teach you that only your buddies in the department have your back and everyone else is out to get you.

Then they train you literally to shoot first and ask questions later. This training consists of variations of the game "slaps" except you're drawing a gun and shooting it at the other player instead of slapping the other player's hands.

And at that point you've been shown (1) that you have a huge target on your back, (2) how to pre-empt a perceived attack, and (3) how to justify the use of force or defend your fellow officer for doing so.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#139

Post by hanselot »

viklove wrote: post #35
jibcage wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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!

whAt you DOn't RANDomIze your typing to Avoid BEINg labEled as RAY Cyst?

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#140

Post by throwaway373438 »

eyerony wrote: post #91
bane wrote: post #71

When I was younger I lived in a fairly rural area. I was driving home late from work one day on a remote highway and came across one of the most horrific accidents I've ever seen. A driver was pulling onto the highway and was hit by a police cruiser at an almost impossibly high speed. The highway was marked at 55mph, and under normal conditions, the driver of the other car would have had plenty of time to pull out, s…

Once saw a police car in a smallish town whip a u-turn for no clear reason, no lights, nothing, nearly hit a car that was pulling out of a bank parking lot and the driver of which had clearly already looked that way and seen no-one coming, then the cop freaked out, u-turned again (lights this time) and pulled over the car they nearly hit. Guess whatever they were breaking traffic laws and driving very dangerously to…

I've seen a lot of talk about how a police officer's job isn't particularly dangerous, with less chance of dying on the job than say a garbageman or taxi driver.

An angle I don't see mentioned quite so often is that for the danger that does exist, most of it is vehicle crash related. One wonders how much is self inflicted due to dangerous driving.

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