Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, how can we be more like Italy?
Get rid of your guns
Easy when you’re not a criminal.
Who will enforce this anyways?
My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
411–420 of 650 posts
Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don’t see this distinction in the big city where I live and each of my neighbors are black. Not to put too fine a point on it and with all due respect, but are you black? Have you asked your black neighbors about it? I am half-black and was raised in California. I have lived in SF for the last 10 years. While I have not directly been troubled by police in SF, I put myself on notice every. Single. Time. I go outsi…
My wife has asked them about it. I have not myself as I have been away on military service since the beginning of May. I think the reasoning for most people in the area is that police interventions motivated by systemic racism are not a visible concern in my area of the city but that they could be a concern, which is fairly distant. Perhaps if this were any other year such concerns could really stand on their own, bu…
You could also ask the people you serve with. I believe a chomsky approach to our lives is very important. Its useful to have a diverse set of friends and colleagues because through multiple view points you have a chance at understanding more of the world.
Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Bear in mind she was stopped because the car she was in had (illegally) tinted front windows. From the article linked in the parent's post: "Court documents later established they were within the legal limit." There was no need for the police to use violent force against this terrified woman, but they did it anyway.
Yes well done. How do you think police determine if they're in limit or not. They test them. She could have been on her way in 5 minutes but chose to act like an idiot.
And police could have resolved this peacefully but chose to escalate the situation with someone who was terrified of them because they were incapable of understanding why she would be scared of them, and in doing so creates more fear when people see how police may treat them.
UK police are generally quite good at de-escalating situations they understand. I've praised them for that many times. E.g. they will go into situations with completely irate people without weapons, and rely on deescalation to bring it under control.
What was it about this situation that prevented this officer from doing that? I've seen first hand that UK police are fully capable of being far more patient in far more serious situations. What was the urgency here?
The police officer chose to escalate in a situation where the suspect was calm until he acted, and where his basis for wanting to search her vehicle in the first place was her fear reaction.
Police need to be able to handle people with mental health issues, so whether or not you think her fear was justified, their way of handling it demonstrated a total failure of compassion in a situation where they had no basis for knowing why she was expressing fear.
The issue remains all too often entirely blind to this kind of fear because they don't believe it is real and fail to understand it, and reacts by making all kinds of flawed conclusions, like in this case where the footage shows signal after signal that her fear of him is genuine, and his response is to assume the only explanation is that she is hiding something.
As we know in retrospect, he demonstrated that he can not be relied on to make that kind of judgement.
Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
#414Earlier 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.
Literally from the article I linked to above:
> A consultant psychiatrist’s note says Bennett had a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder from a serious house fire and is likely to have been unable to comply with police instructions because she was experiencing a severe panic attack.
Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Absolutely. I'm a firefighter. I was the designated driver for two friends. We leave a bar, and I pull up to the intersection. I have a flashing red traffic light, and the cross traffic has a flashing yellow. There is a police car sitting at his flashing yellow, windows down, watching (it's closing time, and there are several people milling about on the street, the usual). I wait. He doesn't move. I wait for approxim…
Hahaha, yeah, same smallish town's cops love to hassle people with late or early shifts playing "20 questions" fishing for drunks or I-don't-even-know-what ("5:30's awfully early to be going to work" look, asshole, take it up with the hour-fifteen of highway I have to cover, how many drunks are you nabbing at this hour on a Tuesday anyway?), usually just obviously fabricating some reason that they stopped you in the first place, without even trying to hide that it's BS (good luck questioning it, though). That's white folks, too, I can't imagine how bad it is there if you've got too much melanin in your skin. Incredibly annoying. Often it just seems like they're super bored and looking for anything at all to do.
Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yet, the party in power in those neighborhoods have had power for 60 years. Why continue to give them blank checks? Why trust their ideas now?
Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not complying with a lawful order _is_ illegal.
Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Almost everyone in southern states visibly carry guns. Umm... no they don't.
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Texas * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Arizona As two quick examples check out the open carry laws in Texas and Arizona where registered personally owned firearms per capita is among the highest in the country.
Yes, open carry laws exist. Yes, people in the South own firearms. Nevertheless your statement that "almost everyone in southern states visibly carry guns" remains false.
A more correct restatement of your claim might be that "many" Southerners openly carry, but that's still a minority of a minority given that, per capita, most Southerners don't even own a gun. "Almost everyone" is reaching into some kind of weird libertarian wild-west fantasy stereotype.
Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
You completely missed the point. It's relevant to this thread that blacks should fear the police more than criminal violence. Well sorry, that's not born out by the statistics, so it's an irrational belief.
You are saying "violence", but the statistics cited in this thread are myopically focused on murder. Non–lethal violence, racial profiling, disproportionate sentencing, etc, are all forms of physical and judicial violence that might justify Black people fearing the police more than criminals.
I don't think that's justified, until I see data to the contrary.
Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works
#420Earlier 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…
> but being comfortably middle class now, I also recognize it's something of a nonstarter with people who don't have that experience. I think this is one of the two culture clashes happening with police versus civilians right now. After the protests in the wake of the Michael Brown killing, there were articles written[1][2] about how there are a ton (many dozens) of tiny towns around Saint Louis each only a few city…
I don't even think that in most cases it's a case of wilfully ignoring. I think many, e.g several people responding to me, genuinely believe more police would lead to more security in poor neighbourhoods.
The trouble as I see it is that police broadly have two functions: to respond to emergencies where violence is likely and to suppress or tax the grey and black economy (huh. just noticed the ufnordunate linguistics of that). The 'responding to emergencies' function will of course still need to be performed, but it's fairly reliable that the poorer a neighbourhood is the less likely the residents are to voluntarily call 911 if an emergency does happen. In truly poor places the 'taxing grey and black markets' part of police work completely overshadows the good done by the 'responding to emergencies' part.
That is understandably very difficult for wealthy people to imagine, because they have very few examples of grey or black markets in their own lives, let alone instances where they have no other options. The thought that most people in any area would rather have enterprising teenagers sell bootleg cigarettes without hassle isn't even repugnant to them, it's just foreign.