Git Repo of Police Brutality During the 2020 George Floyd Protests • Hacker News Board

Re: Git Repo of Police Brutality During the 2020 George Floyd Protests

#91

Post by monocasa » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

nalllar wrote: post #60

mtgp1000 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Giving orders to disperse to does not give police a license to physically assault civilians without provocation Do you expect police to just stand around and wait until people feel like following lawful orders? Should they carry around lollipops to hand out for people who follow directions? >Is this supposed to be exculpatory? If I throw peanuts on someone with a peanut allergy, is "they would have been fine had the…

> Do you expect police to just stand around and wait until people feel like following lawful orders? Yes? If they're incapable of enforcing their orders without hurting people they should not be trying to enforce them. It's bloody alien seeing Americans arguing over this sort of thing as if there's a context that makes hurting the people you're sworn to protect okay. The rest of the world seems to understand what the…

Well, one point is that police here aren't in fact sworn to protect members of the populace. The case law in federal court is that the police don't owe any individual a specific duty to protect them, and that "protect and serve" is a toothless slogan with no basis in law.

Re: Git Repo of Police Brutality During the 2020 George Floyd Protests

#92

Post by microcolonel » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 9:12 PM UTC

Kiro wrote: post #83

monocasa wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in my city, for the protests I attended, this is about the right level of context. The ordering went 1) Peaceful protest 2) Police decide that they need to use extreme amounts of force to break up the peaceful protest 3) Unsavory elements use the cover of the ensuing chaos to loot/burn/tag/etc.

In the Swedish BLM protests it was: 1) Peaceful protest 2) Unsavory elements started throwing things at the police 3) The police didn't respond with violence even though clearly attacked and provoked We have problems with race profiling and other issues but I think the big focus on de-escalation in police training helps a lot to avoid the situation we see in the US.

Wonder if it's "just property" when it's your own.

Re: Git Repo of Police Brutality During the 2020 George Floyd Protests

#93

Post by alexilliamson » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 9:12 PM UTC

iamstupidsimple wrote: post #14

mdszy wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain why you think property is the same importance as human lives being destroyed by people who were sworn to protect them.

I won't go as far as equating property to human lives, but do remember the vast majority of businesses looted or burned were small, already hurting from Covid-19, and a large number of them black owned. Sure, these people's business owners weren't killed, but everything they worked for during their life is pretty much ruined.

Do you have data supporting the claim that most looted businesses were small?

Re: Git Repo of Police Brutality During the 2020 George Floyd Protests

#94

Post by dominotw » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 9:13 PM UTC

theplague42 wrote: post #65

joejoeshabadoo5 wrote: post #8

I wonder if a database similar to this that documented property crimes, or black on white hate crimes would be allowed to stay up?

Crimes committed by civilians are not the same as crimes committed by agents of the state. Also plenty of crime databases already exist so I can only assume you aren't actually asking a question but instead making a snide comment.

> would be allowed to stay up?

that seems to gp's question. not the one you answered about existence of said data somewhere.

If someone just aggregated and filter by criteria gp suggested and created a site with that data, Then it won't be allowed to stay up, is my guess.

Re: Git Repo of Police Brutality During the 2020 George Floyd Protests

#95

Post by microcolonel » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 9:14 PM UTC

chrismcb wrote: post #88

throwawaysea wrote: post #75

From what I saw on Twitter, most of the videos alleging police using force without reason were misleading, and leaving out all the footage preceding police action. In cases where others uploaded longer videos or different angles, it was clear that protesters were acting illegally, or ignoring clear verbal warnings, or refusing lawful orders to disperse, and so on. By leaving those crucial additional bits out, activis…

"Lawful orders to disperse" is there such a thing? You don't hear about "lawful orders to stop speaking" or "lawful orders to stop practicing a religion " And just because a" clear verbal warming " was issued, doesn't mean it had to be followed, nor does it mean excessive force woukd be used. While I agree that some instances of "peaceful protestors" aren't actually peacful, many are. And in some of the cases where t…

When your protest becomes a riot, yes, it is lawful to order dispersal. You have a right to expression, not a right to ransack other people's property (public and private), if you commit the latter in the guise of the former, then you are in the wrong.

Re: Git Repo of Police Brutality During the 2020 George Floyd Protests

#96

Post by ogre_codes » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 9:14 PM UTC

TheGrim-888 wrote: post #54

Just a reminder that none of this is factual or evidence. It COULD be, but just because somebody writes something doesn't make it true. You are not given any of the context of what happened in these situations. If there's video the video starts when the conflict is already full swing, you're not seeing anything that led up to the situation. You can read "Police showed up and fired tear gas and agitated the crowd and…

> You can read "Police showed up and fired tear gas and agitated the crowd and caused violence", but you're not told WHY they fired tear gas. You're not given the context as to what happened.

Police have body cameras and vehicle cameras that can provide much of the rest of the context. The public doesn't have access to that video and the police don't release it save when it reinforces their narrative.

If the police were blameless here, they have lots of tools to clear their name.

Re: Git Repo of Police Brutality During the 2020 George Floyd Protests

#97

Post by ImaCake » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 9:15 PM UTC

mjcohen wrote: post #49

Gonna need terabytes.

I'm not sure if you are serious but even millions of events recorded in text would not take up too much space. Bioinformatics datasets that run into the millions of lines still only require a few gigabytes, and they are often compressed into tarballs which can halve their size.

Moore's law is on the side of the protesters here, this information can spread easily because it does not require much bandwidth (without video) for anyone to `git pull remote` this whole repository.

I hope that helps explain why some people have downvoted you without explanation (for the record, I did not).

Re: Git Repo of Police Brutality During the 2020 George Floyd Protests

#98

Post by verdverm » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

mamon wrote: post #89

verdverm wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent post may be hinting at selective censorship by the platforms, which is their right as a private org. There's a lot of angst around that on both sides in America. Parent post used bad language if this is their reason for posting. Otherwise it's just antagonistic and unwelcome

>> selective censorship by the platforms, which is their right as a private org So, just because they are not government they are allowed to lie and manipulate? Because "selective censorship" is just this: manipulation.

Censorship / removing fake news & propaganda is an unsolved problem. We are just starting to have this conversation. No need to imply that all cases are out of malice

Re: Git Repo of Police Brutality During the 2020 George Floyd Protests

#99

Post by tartoran » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 9:17 PM UTC

verdverm wrote: post #67

gruez wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You are not given any of the context of what happened in these situations. If there's video the video starts when the conflict is already full swing, you're not seeing anything that led up to the situation. If only there was some sort of recording device that we can put on police officers, and either they can be trusted not to "accidentally" turn it off when an incident occurs or is always-on.

I checked my local city, some of the incidents are true, others lack evidence, others seem to lack a brutality component all together (such as firing a pepper all at the ground in front of someone breaking the law. No doubt we have a problem, this is a great start to a collection, but we may want to consider filtering for truth or at least incidents with credible evidence

Before we filter for truth lets train our police force to be less violent because that breads more violence on the other end and we all loose except for the powerheads in charge as well as the real gangsters. Police have no right to be violent, they do get a paycheck for fsake, and they have the law on their side as well.

I will respect all cops when they earn it. So far I respect only those I interacted with and were well behaved, polite, etc

Re: Git Repo of Police Brutality During the 2020 George Floyd Protests

#100

Post by jquery » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 9:20 PM UTC

ogre_codes wrote: post #96

TheGrim-888 wrote: post #54

Just a reminder that none of this is factual or evidence. It COULD be, but just because somebody writes something doesn't make it true. You are not given any of the context of what happened in these situations. If there's video the video starts when the conflict is already full swing, you're not seeing anything that led up to the situation. You can read "Police showed up and fired tear gas and agitated the crowd and…

> You can read "Police showed up and fired tear gas and agitated the crowd and caused violence", but you're not told WHY they fired tear gas. You're not given the context as to what happened. Police have body cameras and vehicle cameras that can provide much of the rest of the context. The public doesn't have access to that video and the police don't release it save when it reinforces their narrative. If the police w…

In the current environment, I’m not so sure. I was really negative on the St. Louis couple that pulled guns on protesters... until I learned the “peaceful” protesters were on private property and had already destroyed an iron gate and were threatening to burn down their house. None of those latter facts were easily available until I dug deeper into the story. The New York Times story that shows up when I Google mentions none of these facts, most importantly that the protesters, more accurately a rioting mob, were on private property.

So what does this leave us with? A story designed to inflame. Complicating matters more is that the couple were actually big donators to BLM and the DNC, which adds more layers to the narrative, but of course this isn’t mentioned and we are meant to assume they are Trump voters (even though that doesn’t make a difference legally, it makes a difference narratively)

EDIT: and the happy-go-lucky censors downvote into oblivion, proving my point.