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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

#741

Post by deathgrips »

jowsie wrote: post #395
deathgrips wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK if police need guns on scene, they clear the area and call a specialized sharpshooter team.

At least where I live in the UK half the police have guns, they're just locked in their car 99.999% of the time. A lot more UK police have guns than most people think. Any car with a 5 point star (orange in my area) is an armed response vehicle. Maybe US cops need to just leave their guns in their cars more often? Example: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/HXD0AX/windsor-uk-27th-march-2017-...

Great idea.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#743

Post by deathgrips »

GhostVII wrote: post #479
deathgrips wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't dish out what you can't take. I've never seen an example of riots breaking out in a city before police instigate violence with rubber bullets and tear gas. Also, if he can't keep his cool under those conditions, he has an obligation to change jobs because if he can't handle it he's just putting other people in danger.

> I've never seen an example of riots breaking out in a city before police instigate violence with rubber bullets and tear gas. Minneapolis was burning before the police responded, not after.

That's not what I saw on livestreams.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#744

Post by deathgrips »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #230
deathgrips wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't dish out what you can't take. I've never seen an example of riots breaking out in a city before police instigate violence with rubber bullets and tear gas. Also, if he can't keep his cool under those conditions, he has an obligation to change jobs because if he can't handle it he's just putting other people in danger.

>I've never seen an example of riots breaking out in a city before police instigate violence with rubber bullets and tear gas. LA Riots in 1992. Police pulled out to avoid conflict and it resulted in looting and burning for days until the National Guard showed up.

You don't think police instigated violence when they killed Rodney King?

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#745

Post by tikiman163 »

rzwitserloot wrote: post #685
AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's reasonable, but how do we punish (or otherwise deter) offenses? The most obvious answer seems to be to fine the offenders, but really, how do you fine a homeless person?

Good question. But note that the status quo answer has been proven to be woefully suitable. Fining the homeless seems silly, and unlikely to serve as either a deterrent or as workable compensation for society at large. Throwing them in a jail is even worse; it is unlikely to deter (part of the problem is that there are mental issues at work which are likely going to make _any_ deterrence ineffective, you need complet…

In the case of homelessness there have been pilot programs that actually show the cost of just giving chronicly homeless people permanent housing and psychological counseling to be dramatically less expensive to society than our current solutions. By providing housing in these cases we reduce the prison population, which is much less expensive than counseling and a small living space. Counseling and access to preventative medical services is dramatically less expensive than the frequent cost of deploying ambulances and treating more severe, advanced and frequent infections/injuries they acquire while homeless.

Additionally, giving them homes has strongly correlated with a reduction in drug trafficking. These programs did not require the participants to stay drug free or to join any programs, but often they were buying/selling for reasons that were addressed by the basic provisions of the programs.

These programs aren't meant for everyone that's homeless. Many people are only homeless temporarily and the existing shelter programs handle those cases somewhat acceptably, but the major contrasting factor with the issues we're currently discussing is that these programs had zero involvement of the police. The police were told explicitly to leave its participants alone and not only did the homelessness issues go away, but their state budgets decreased overall.

You make good points about not being able to fully decriminalize certain things, but there are nuances specific to circumstances that make treating many societal problems as crimes to be less effective and more expensive than properly implemented social programs.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#746

Post by chrisco255 »

chillwaves wrote: post #177
brigandish wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bare assertion followed by a bare refusal isn't much help. If you would instead provide some information, that would be a big help to all those of us who do not live in Seattle.

If the statement is not factual, what else is there to say? All I know is Fox News has been caught photoshopping images and lying during their news broadcasts about these incidents.

They've taken over blocks, blocking traffic, stopping the flow of people and businesses into that area, they've disregarded state and local laws, etc. It's completely factual. Whatever Fox News has been doing to drum up hits on their website is completely irrelevant.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#747

Post by ardy42 »

vorpalhex wrote: post #721
ardy42 wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, if there's someone hanging out by themselves then de-escalate and do whatever. The moment there are innocent people in harms way though, that calculus changes. No, it's not that simple. Police escalation itself can put innocent people in harms way. The police can shoot, miss, and kill innocent bystanders . Escalation can provoke a criminal to start shooting and kill innocent bystanders or police. That's not t…

Cops kill about 1600 people total (justified and non-justified combined) per year in the US. There are about 16,000 murders per year in the US. Out of the ~1550 people killed by police in 2019, about 40 were unarmed. You should be much more concerned about a criminal harming you than a police officer.

> Cops kill about 1600 people total (justified and non-justified combined) per year in the US. There are about 16,000 murders per year in the US. Out of the ~1550 people killed by police in 2019, about 40 were unarmed.

> You should be much more concerned about a criminal harming you than a police officer.

There's a lot wrong with your comment, and one issue is your conclusion obviously does not follow from your (unsourced) statistics. If you want to reason from statistics, they have to be measuring comparable situations, which yours are not. Being killed by police is more like being murdered by a stranger, which is much less common than being murdered by anyone including people known to you [1].

Another issue being armed does not justify a police shooting, which you kind of imply. For instance, Philando Castile was armed, but clearly should not have been shot by police.

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#748

Post by hef19898 »

socraticmethod wrote: post #740
zaarn wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From top of my head, what I was told from officers (my dad and others), police isn't conditioned to ai I'm for the center of mass. They rather aim for the legs and such. SWAT being an exception, of course, depending on circumstances.

It is still shooting at people, so potentially deadly. But less so than putting 6 bullets into someone's chest.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#749

Post by chrisco255 »

nl wrote: post #346
chrisco255 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de... just under 1000 police involved shootings each year. Can't find the source, but of these only about 47 were un-armed and most of those involved protecting someone else from a physical attack.

> Can't find the source, but of these only about 47 were un-armed and most of those involved protecting someone else from a physical attack. This is wrong. https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed lists 1ists at least 104 unarmed black people alone killed by police in 2015. I went though the first 20, and maybe 8 could have been accidents (one was hit by a car) or otherwise explained (2 pointed toy guns at police).

Just pulling some of these randomly out, there's quite a few that are clearly not caused by the police: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2015/may/13/jail-inmate-di...

> Officers arrested the man for violating a domestic violence no contact order and unlawful possession of a firearm

> the man went into cardiac arrest during processing.

> Correction officers began resuscitation immediately, police said, and the man was transported to the hospital while he still had a pulse. He later died at the hospital.

https://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2015/07/10/Physical-...

> Ms. Harris declined to comment through an Allegheny County Jail Health Justice project spokeswoman, but she has said that her son took an anti-seizure medication twice daily and called her from the jail to ask for help getting health care workers there to give him the medication

> He died of acute peritonitis due to colon perforation, and the death was ruled natural.

> Our records indicate that within ten minutes of Mr. Smart’s arrival at medical intake, our staff ordered the medications he said he needed, and he received those medications as prescribed. During an emergency event later that evening, our records show that our staff administered additional treatment to Mr. Smart and that he responded to the medical care provided.

This is an extremely misleading website and not a reliable source.

Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

#750

Post by lvs »

lazyjones wrote: post #548
lvs wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think society is looking for police to be an average good. That is, we're not looking to optimize on the statistical mean of police interactions. We are concerned particularly about the tails. The outliers are the problem, particularly when they're not as uncommon as we expect them to be. You may call them propaganda, but that's a strange thing to post on an enumerated list of recorded evidence.

> We are concerned particularly about the tails. That's not my impression when people are openly calling for defunding or disbanding police departments. Those who are concerned with the tails are the sane voices drowning in a sea of insanity these days. I agree that the outliers are the problem, but how uncommon they are cannot be determined in this way.

Don't get too caught up on the definitions of words. What they are arguing is that many things have been attempted to rein in the tails, and they have all failed. An engineer has to look at a series of failures and find new solutions, not the same old ones that keep failing. Sometimes that means redesign from scratch.
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