Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

propublica.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 650 posts

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

#401

Post by FireBeyond »

treis wrote: post #168
trowawee wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "[...] justifiably or not [...] extrajudicial and unjust tactics are used" ...how could this be justifiable?

Let's assume that Europe's cops are at 100% capacity to handle their crime justly. That means the US cops can do the same for only 10% of the crime they see. Leaving 90% of the crime to go unpunished. Or they can do shady tactics and respond to more crime at the cost of Injustice. Obviously the ideal solution is to 10x the capacity of the criminal justice system but nobody's paying for that.

One of the slogans of the Thin Blue Line is "Sometimes there's justice, sometimes there's just us."

Perhaps less people would see fascist, totalitarian overtones in law enforcement if some segments of the police wouldn't openly state this.

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

#402

Post by [deleted] »

noobaccount wrote: post #356
Wohlf wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Or, from another angle, it means that criminality in US is so much worse than the average EU country that it's ok to kill so many people in the name of safety. Number of homicides in the USA in 2017: 19,510 Deaths per 100,000 population: 6.0 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm Number of homicides in Italy in 2017: 357 Deaths per 100,000 population: 0.6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Italy

Wow, how can we be more like Italy?

[deleted]

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

#403

Post by bdamm »

randompwd wrote: post #381
thephyber wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but chose to act like an idiot Do people choose to have panic attacks? There are lots of documented cases of people who have panic attacks on planes and flip out. Are they "idiots" in your mind?

How is she having a panic attack? How is anything about her behaviour that night congruous to a panic attack? Seems like you're just writing an alternative narrative to explain away her behaviour.

Regardless of any psychological label, the woman is clearly panicking, and the panic is caused by the police interaction. Being afraid and panicking is not illegal. If the police wanted to do this differently, they could issue a ticket for inspection, throw it in the car, and move on with their day. But instead they chose to get in a power struggle.

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

#404

Post by stefan_ »

ciarannolan wrote: post #8
danharaj wrote: post #2

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

For those curious who didn't know about this (like me): >With offices in 11 foreign capitals and an unpublished budget, the ILP’s far-flung counterterrorism cops operate outside the authority of top U.S. officials abroad, including the American ambassador and the CIA station chief, who is the nominal head of U.S. intelligence in foreign countries. >The ILP is supported by private donors through the New York Police Fo…

keep having to preface everything lately with "not a joke," but no joke the NYPD's International Liaison Program, which has a secret budget and operates in 13 foreign countries with no oversight, just showed up in an official NYPD cruiser for a pro-police demonstration in Paris

https://mobile.twitter.com/newyorkyearzero/status/1273754924...

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

#405

Post by sidlls »

woeirua wrote: post #319
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming from a poor (and incidentally very white) area myself, I understand the sentiment behind 'defund the police', but being comfortably middle class now, I also recognize it's something of a nonstarter with people who don't have that experience. I prefer 'Police Out Of Poor Neighborhoods'. Police actually add value in rich neighborhoods (maybe by definition), and it's got a humorous acronym. Edit: And police are m…

Yes, lets further exacerbate class disparities by now only providing safety and security for the rich. At least this way we can stop pretending that we even care about the poor.

I can't second the GPs post hard enough. Police tend to abuse the poor much more often than they help. When they are there to help it's usually a zero-sum proposition: one poor person, usually a non-white, is gonna get a beat down at the hands of "justice" far out of proportion to whatever transgression against another poor person they may be guilty of.

I grew up poor, white, in a neighborhood with non-whites (black, asian, and hispanic). None of us was safe from the police, though whites were in marginally less danger generally.

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

#406

Post by treis »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #387
treis wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's misleading to the point of lying. The "already" here means the split second between Brooks firing it at the officer and the officer shooting him.

Split second? The officer hadn't even drawn his gun when Brooks fired the Taser. He made the decision to draw his gun in the first place already knowing that the Taser Brooks held was depleted.

It's on video and that's clearly not true:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnHecVdUysQ

The officer starts reaching for his gun between seconds 4 and 5, Brooks fires the tazer in second 5 and then is shot at the end of second 6.

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

#407

Post by lotsofpulp »

hundchenkatze wrote: post #184
Jtsummers wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the town I used to live in in GA (about 125k people) accidents like this (though not that severe) were frequent on a couple of hilly roads. Marked as 35-45mph depending on the section, the police would drive at 80mph or more down the road. Usually they ticketed the person they hit. At least one cop I knew was actually proud of how he was able to stick it to the guy pulling out of a fast food restaurant. I respect…

Several years ago I was test driving a car owned by a cop in rural Tennessee. He was riding with me and I turned onto a smaller road with a 45mph speed limit. I was taking it slow and easy when he said "ah don't worry about the speed limit, I've got an E-Tag, let's go" I didn't know what an E-Tag was at the time but apparently it's an "Emergency Vehicle" tag given to officers to put on their unmarked, personal vehicl…

> it was my first time seeing that the police are above the law.

I like to illustrate corruption in the US by showing them the fake badges that cops’ friends or family put on the windshield of (endemic in the NYC area) or the “I donate to the police union” stickers.

Or of course the actual police union gold cards or whatever that police spouses and kids get.

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

#408

Post by jaybeeayyy »

symlinkk wrote: post #352
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming from a poor (and incidentally very white) area myself, I understand the sentiment behind 'defund the police', but being comfortably middle class now, I also recognize it's something of a nonstarter with people who don't have that experience. I prefer 'Police Out Of Poor Neighborhoods'. Police actually add value in rich neighborhoods (maybe by definition), and it's got a humorous acronym. Edit: And police are m…

You’re joking right? Poor neighborhoods have the highest rates of crime.

And the billions spent on police aren't exactly doing much to stop it so it's probably time to change the way we handle crime in low income areas.

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

#409

Post by iguy »

cliffy wrote: post #102
treis wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has an order of magnitude more crime than Europe but is policed by roughly the same number of officers. That, justifiably or not, leads to short cuts where extrajudicial and unjust tactics are used to enforce compliance.

[flagged]

> What kind of crime? Violent? Non-violent?

The US has more murders than Europe for sure. This is the simplest statistic to collect, because the definition of a dead body doesn't vary, and in any functional country almost all of them end up in the morgue.

For other violent crimes like assault it's not so clear, by some numbers Canada & UK lead the US. Maybe it's easier to punch someone if you don't need to worry that he may have a gun. Or maybe the police record similar events differently, or never hear about some events.

For rape IIRC Sweden is the only western country which makes the world top 10, the US is way down the list. But this has under-reporting problems everywhere, and perhaps much larger ones some places than others.

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

#410

Post by pnako »

hef19898 wrote: post #161
greenhatglack wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most working class in Europe live in "extreme" areas also "not-wanted-to-be-officially-known-as-no-go" zones. Lol, I love how you question if I've live/d there, like the complete inability to take in information that might not be fit to your world view.

I don't know of any no-go zones. Sure, some areas in larger cities tend to be more dangerous than others. But still far from no-go zones. No idea where this information comes from.

In France, there are definitely a few. There are places where even the fire brigade gets attacked. That's why they're called "no-go zones". The police can still go there but only with heavy means; you can't just send a random police car with two cops there, you need special units in riot gear.

The French term commonly used in the media is "zones de non droit" meaning "areas outside of the law" or sometimes, perhaps more politically charged, "territoire perdus de la république" (the republic's lost territories).

Officially they are known under various names that start with "zone". Currently the official term is "zones de sécurité prioritaire" (areas of priority security).

Those areas generally correspond to the areas that most countries warn about in their advice to travelers when it comes to France.

They exist in other European countries as well under similar names.

Post reply on HN