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George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

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Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#731

Post by jonnypotty »

alkonaut wrote: post #354
jonnypotty wrote: post #339

Anyone thinks this is just a US issue is mistaken. This is what power does if you really challenge it. The friendly face disappears pretty quick.

I don't think the problem of police brutality is nearly as big in western Europe or other comparable places.

You maybe right but I'm just saying people would do well to remember that this is what the police are for. To control you. The idea their treatment of people is down to "the law" is obviously false. They exert the power of the state. This, brutality, this abuse of power would happen anywhere people have learnt to dehumanise each other.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#732

Post by clairity »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #576
clairity wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're entirely warranted to be pissed about tear gas use, but it's misguided to expect quick and accurate federal redress, as the executive function intentionally doesn't cover state or local jurisdictions. states run themselves, and the federal judiciary basically only steps in when state/local governments don't follow their own rules (the presumed expression of the will of the people) or violate the constitution.…

> you want power local and limited, not consolidated and far away. that would only make things like use of force worse. Maybe in your country but in many, many places in the world this is demonstrably not the case.

> "Maybe in your country but in many, many places in the world this is demonstrably not the case."

as with markets, idiosyncratic conditions like sociopathy can lead to pockets of undue concentrations of power, no doubt.

but it would be even worse if those same conditions were concentrated on and elevated to wider populations. by distributing power, you can more effectively pit one against the other, and have some chance of bettering conditions over time. those chances decrease with power concentration.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#733

Post by DebtDeflation »

SkyBelow wrote: post #636
cies wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe "the right not to be prosecuted for a victimless crime" should be an amendment. Then homelessness/drugs-whatevers/prostitution can no longer have laws against them. "Address the root cause", exactly, and the root cause is the unjust laws. Though cops pretty much never being found guilty for unjust use of violence is a big one too, and I wonder what law changes can solve that issue.

The problem is the notion of victimless. There are crimes that put people at risk but don't always create a victim. Do we allow for crimes that have a risk of a victim even if there isn't a direct victim? There are crimes where we say that someone is a victim despite their own feelings of being victimized or having suffered a crime. Do those stay as well? We have crimes where there isn't someone physically hurt and n…

What you're describing here are negative externalities. From an Economics perspective (I was an Econ major) the solution is neither to ignore them (as many libertarians do) nor to ban the activities, but rather to regulate them in such a way that you force the party creating the externalities to internalize the costs that they are imposing on others. Typically through some form of Pigouvian Tax, Cap and Trade scheme, or insurance requirement.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#734

Post by lisper »

AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #728
lisper wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an issue about which I happen to have some direct knowledge. I once made a documentary film about homelessness: http://graceofgodmovie.com/ And you're right, there are some people who are homeless by choice, but they are a tiny, tiny minority, probably less than 1% of the homeless population.

So, I've just checked the HUD report [1] and apparently in NY about 5% of homeless are what they call "unsheltered". I sincerely wonder why. My "off-the-top" theory would be that these people are either indeed homeless by choice or they are such assholes that not a single shelter would tolerate them. How wrong am I? [1] https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/5948/2019-ahar-part-1-...

> How wrong am I?

Very. Did you actually read the report? The answer is right there:

"On a single night in 2019, roughly 568,000 people were experiencing homelessness in the United States. Nearly two-thirds (63%) were staying in sheltered locations—emergency shelters or transitional housing programs—and more than one-third (37%) were in unsheltered locations such as on the street, in abandoned buildings, or in other places not suitable for human habitation."

So being unsheltered has nothing at all to do with being voluntarily homeless. These are completely orthogonal matters. In fact, the HUD report does not deal with voluntary homelessness at all, almost certainly because the number of such people is so small that they can be safely discounted for public policy purposes.

It is also really hard to assess whether someone is voluntarily homeless. My film was shot in Santa Monica, CA. One of the subjects I interviewed had reliable income, enough to pay the rent somewhere, but not in Santa Monica. Given the choice between being on the street in Santa Monica and being in a low-rent apartment in some random place far from home, he chose to stay in Santa Monica. But all else being equal he would have preferred to be inside. Is that person "voluntarily homeless"?

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#735

Post by clairity »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #527
clairity wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're entirely warranted to be pissed about tear gas use, but it's misguided to expect quick and accurate federal redress, as the executive function intentionally doesn't cover state or local jurisdictions. states run themselves, and the federal judiciary basically only steps in when state/local governments don't follow their own rules (the presumed expression of the will of the people) or violate the constitution.…

Why would people want power local and limited? Noting the sordid history of local, "States Rights", Jim Crow style policies that exist at the local level. Especially when the issue concerns US policing which is the ideological descendant of slave patrols.

> "Why would people want power local and limited?"

it's worse if we had the same sordid problems at a state or national level. it's rolling the dice once or 50 times vs. rolling them ~50,000 times.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#736

Post by mindslight »

vorpalhex wrote: post #715
mindslight wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qualified Immunity just sets the default and is mostly a red herring (not that it shouldn't be addressed). A city could easily declare that an officer acted outside their explicit government duties when committing a crime. Furthermore, this could be straightforwardly clarified in their contract. In general you're repeating talking points about fragments of what I said, while ignoring my substantive points. For instan…

> why haven't Breonna Taylor's killers been charged and put in jail, or at the very least quickly fired? Because they are "innocent until proven guilty". It's not as if they've been going on calls and continuing to kick in doors - the investigation was handed to the FBI (a federal body) and the officers were put on leave until that investigation is finished. If they are fired and it turns out they were acting lawfull…

> The issue is that you feel you are correct, and to that end you're making broad unspecific claims that aren't factual

No, I made general claims about a larger pattern. If you don't agree that police have managed to weasel out of most accountability, then there's really no discussion to be had. Yet you jumped in anyway to push some police-justifying nonsense ("Contracts are negotiated like any other") that grossly contradicts the events under discussion.

>> why haven't Breonna Taylor's killers been charged and put in jail, or at the very least quickly fired?

>Because they are "innocent until proven guilty".

The first step is charging someone, which has not been done. Everyone in jail is innocent - guilty people go to prison. Once again, procedural details that sound sensible while adding up into a constructively corrupt system. The case has been turned over to the FBI precisely due to the local corruption.

As you are implying some alternative justice path for cops, I'll be explicit: To evaluate how well the rule of law is working, you only have to ask yourself what would happen to a non-cop who performed the exact same actions. Specifically, what would have happened to a group of non-cops that committed a home invasion resulting in murder?

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#737

Post by zaarn »

dragontamer wrote: post #658
zaarn wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anime can be made in other countries than Japan, it's a genre not an origin.

"Anime" as a word isn't even a genre. Its... incredibly ill-defined. Actual genres would be "Shonen" (Dragonball Z, Full Metal Alchemist, My Hero Academia), "RomCom" (Ah My Goddess, SNAFU), "Magical Girl" (Sailor Moon, Pretty Cure), Mecha (Gundam), "Sci Fi" (Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in a Shell), "Mindfuck" (Evangeleon, Paprika, Paranoia Agent), or "Isekai" (Overlord, Sword Art, Slime) And a few shows are blend between gen…

I don't think you speak for the entire community. In the anime communities I frequent, it is perfectly acceptable to call ATLA an anime and nobody will bat an eye.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#738

Post by [deleted] »

whydoyoucare wrote: post #626
markstos wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police unions have considerable influence to block reform even when the elected politicians support it: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/police-unions-minneapo... The efforts to "defund police" would solve some of the same problems that police currently address through other means. This would weaken the influence of police unions. For example, spending more to treat drug addiction as a disease rather than paying…

Instead of "defund", maybe a better word, then, is "reform", or "reorganize"? Or maybe define that it is "police unions" who should be defunded, not the entire bucket called "police"? I am just curious at this choice of word that seems to be the clarion call, which means entirely different in the dictionary than what is being implied! :-/

[deleted]

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#739

Post by baddox »

downerending wrote: post #514
baddox wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite the opposite. The adversarial job should have higher standards of conduct, not lower.

Unfortunately, criminals aren't going to have higher standards of conduct, even if they "should". That's why we call them criminals. And the police have to deal with these people all day long--there's no easy comparison to other jobs.

Again, we have data on that. Police do not have to deal with violent or dangerous criminals very much, especially during traffic stops.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#740

Post by socraticmethod »

zaarn wrote: post #617
hef19898 wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a rule of thumb, coming from my dad who served in the German federal police and was sent to every single castor transport (nuclear waste to be stored in Germany, quite a controversial topic) up to 2007/8, countless fottball games and G8/20, NATO conferences, demonstrtions decrease in violence with increasing numbers of children, women and older people. Applies to both sides, except for the children of course. The…

German police is trained to deescalate if possible and for riot or protest control, use of lethal weaponry is rarely authorized if riot control is necessary at all. Water cannons can still hurt people but they're massively less lethal than any type of bean bag rounds or rubber bullets. Notably, the German police is also trained for much longer, three to four years at minimum. They're trained with guns to aim for part…

" They're trained with guns to aim for parts of the body that make it less likely to kill a target instantly or quickly and instead incapacitates them (of course, with a gun you can never know but you can alter the odds) "

This is the third time I've read this in the comments but I can't seem to find any info on "shoot to incapacitate" online. I'm not doubting it, I'm just looking to collect information regarding the topic to share with others. Do you have anything to corroborate this training method?

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