100% agree. They can and do make up shit all the time. A co-worker of mine was arrested last weekend when a crime was committed at his house and they told him to leave the premises. So, he crawled into the back seat of his car and went to sleep (it was 1am Saturday morning and he had nowhere to go). A hour or two later they arrested him because they told him to leave. He was in a parked car on the street. They charged him with obstruction. They dropped the charges 24 hours later.
>"Edward Anthony Anderson, January 15, 1996, shot while handcuffed and on the ground. Frankie Arzuega, fifteen years old, January 12, 1996, shot in the back of the head; the following Mother’s Day, his family received taunting phone calls from anonymous sources: they dialed *69 (call back) and the police answered. Anthony Baez, December 22, 1994, chocked to death for playing football on the streets of New Your City. Rene Campos, whom police said committed suicide in custody by stuffing more than half his T-shirt down his own throat, reaching three-quarters of the way down to his lungs. Garland Carter, seventeen years old, January 8, 1996, shot in the back by police who earlier that day had driven by his home, making their fingers into the shape of a gun and “firing.” Angel Castro, fifteen years old, October 23, 1996. Having already moved out of a neighborhood because of death threats from the police, Castro rode his bike back to the neighborhood to a friend’s birthday party: He accidentally ran into a police cruiser, breaking his teeth, and as he rose from the ground a cop shot him. Sherly Colon, April 25, 1997, pushed off the roof of a housing project, after which police removed the cuffs which had held her hands behind her back….The list is as long as you want to make it..." –The Culture of Make Believe, Derrick Jensen
The Culture of Make Believe is a very difficult book to get through. The author talks about hate crimes and power, and how we've developed these very odd cultural norms around violence. It's pretty depressing.
Sounds very similar to some of the most chilling stories from South Africa during Apartheid: political prisoners whose corpses were photographed and clearly beaten to a pulp with the official cause of death listed as, "fell against chair."
O please the old story of the big bad apartheid regime.
For a bit more perspective: During the difficult transition period 1990 - 1994, security forces (police) caused 518 deaths[1]. Compare that with 2013 US police caused 930 - 1240 deaths and South African police caused 409 deaths[2]. Keep in mind that during this transitional period there was basically a civil war of sorts going on, with 14000 political murders between ANC and other freedom factions during this time (1990 - 1994).
And even today under a free and democratic government it is reported that police behavior is a least just as bad as under apartheid[3]. Currently the police death rate, taking into account population differences is twice as bad as the USA police death rate and four times as bad as during the worst years of police brutality during apartheid.
Fact is South Africa is a deeply divided country and single sentence statements such as the one of the parent poster does no justice to the complexities that is the continually worsening South African situation.
1) The US has six times the population of South Africa.
2) A police officer killing someone, is not necessarily murder. You're going to have to break out how many of those are acts of self-defense, because it's a non-trivial number (likely the majority are in fact self-defense). [1] Some of America's inner cities are wildly violent, with murder rates on par with the worst areas of Latin America (ie some of the worst areas on earth for murder). Try policing a perpetual war zone that has been raging for 40 years.
From your comment I'm not sure if you are agreeing or disagreeing with me, but:
1)The US has six times the population of South Africa.
Absolutely, thats why I said South Africa currently has about twice the police killings rate the US has. So the math is: South Africa police killings = 409 to be comparable on a per capita basis with the US rate of between 900 - 1200 divide by 6 = 150 to 200 death per year if the US had the same population as South Africa, which is a rate your linked article also supports. Compare that with the apartheid rate of 518 deaths over 4 years, so about 130 deaths per year. (But ok I have not taken 20 years of population growth into account).
2) A police officer killing someone, is not necessarily murder. You're going to have to break out how many of those are acts of self-defense,
Absolutely, but that is a very difficult thing to do, especially only armed with google. Furthermore police statistics these days in South Africa is renowned to be of especially poor quality, so I have to work with what I have.
2) Some of America's inner cities are wildly violent, with murder rates on par with the worst areas of Latin America (ie some of the worst areas on earth for murder). Try policing a perpetual war zone that has been raging for 40 years.
Your joking right. South Africa has an average murder rate of 34 / 100 000 [1], seven times worse than the USA. And if you want to compare the worst with the worst (Detroit), compare it with our farm murder rate of around 300 / 100 000 [2] which is actually worse than most war zones.
So in summary, police killings during the worst years of apartheid was less than or at least on par with police killings in the US currently and police killings in current day South Africa is about twice as bad as both.
>>Try policing a perpetual war zone that has been raging for 40 years.
So your point here is that systematic racism isn't so bad because when the whites ruled the blacks the statistics were better? I.e. you're saying white people are objectively superior?
No that's not my point at all, that's called setting up a straw man argument..., please don't do that.
My point being, I disagreed that in your very first point you mentioned that police killings were a very common occurrence during apartheid ("some of the most chilling stories from South Africa during Apartheid"), and I argued that it was less common than current day USA and much less common than current day South Africa.
Now there is one very interesting conclusion that you might have missed from my point, and that is that in terms of police killings, either currently the USA is as bad as apartheid South Africa was, or that apartheid South Africa wasn't as bad as you remember.
I didn't say anything about how common police killings were in Apartheid. If you could please also not engage in logical fallacies.
I bring up Apartheid because they were notorious for covering up some truly horrific things that police did and the modus operandi was suppressing opposition. When I see similarities in the kind of things they try to pass off to explain deaths in custody, I think that connection needs to be made.
What I take issue with is your dismissal of my negative remark about "big, bad Apartheid." Yeah, Apartheid was bad.
Apartheid was bad, absolutely. But then according to the stats, it was better than current day USA (which was perhaps the connection you wanted to make?) and much better than current day South Africa (at least insofar as police killings are concerned).
Jesus, what a rant because I used the word Apartheid. Yes, I got screwed over by later presidents too, but it doesn't make me afraid to condemn the system that existed before. Get over whatever issues you need to resolve. You say "big bad apartheid regime" like you could take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaner_Weerstandsbeweging and tell me it's all just a big misunderstanding.
Whats your point? You linked to an extremist movement who had marginal support and had no affiliation with the government that existed during apartheid and that somehow proves what exactly? I mean I could link back to KKK or alt-right movements and that somehow vilifies the current USA governments (past and current) just because these groups exists?
Truth be told, I've got no beef with you or an axe to grind on the subject, I just try to provide some perspective to the situation.
For interests sake, do you have a link to the story about suspects getting murdered and then the police report indicating the suspect "fell against a chair". That's certainly the first I've heard about it. There certainly were some atrocities committed by both sides (whites and blacks or goverment and ANC), so I am not denying it is possible. For a good account if you want, there is an excellent book written by the police commissioner Johan van der Merwe: Trou tot die dood toe. I am not sure if it is available in english, and you might question the integrity / truthfulness of the book, but in my opinion it gives a fairly even account of the events of that time from the perspective of the police commissioner, and the commissioner himself is highly regarded, even by Nelson Mandela so that counts for something...
See my other comment for the rest, but the "fell against chair" case was documented in Donald Woods' book. It wasn't Biko specifically (though I believe his official explanation was "hunger strike", which was even bigger bullshit), but I believe it was more or less a contemporary of his.
While those are horrifying examples, I dislike this approach of cherry picking and focusing on the worst cases. It can make a problem seem much worse than it really is and make it difficult to tell what is the result of systemic problems and what are individual bad actors.
It's akin to someone mentioning flying and then going into gruesome detail about all of the terrible airline accidents over the years to suggest that flying is unsafe.
Expecting no problems is absurd. Zero is very different from small, in terms of possibility and cost.
The real issue is, how did the system react to this? How does it self-correct? This is where so much of government falls down as they close ranks around themselves, identifying with the role they have first instead of identifying with their fellow citizens.
This is a natural way to be (tribal), but it is also extremely problematic.
I have a similar story of inept police and injustice:
I have an uncle who is a real piece of work. A druggie who my great-grandparents adopted, raised and supported until they both died.
One night he was at my great-grandparents house, harrassing them for money and threatening them. My poor great-grandfather, a 71 year old man at the time, called 911. The operator heard my uncle scream something about killing my grand-grandmother. I guess he was coming off of drugs.
By the time the local sheriff's office responded to the call, my uncle Tim was long gone. The only male present was my 71 year old great-grandfather, so the two deputies incompetently assumed he was the perpetrator.
They didn't even let him put on shoes.
They manhandled my poor grandfather. They took him to jail and he slept on the floor of a cell. He was extremely injured, my mother was furious and encouraged him to press charges. But he was a stubborn old man who spent most of his life as a fire-and-brimstone pastor of a church, in other words he was too polite to take them to court.
The pictures of his injuries are burned into my brain. Massive scrapes, his thin skin peeled back. Bruises all over his face and body. The idea of him sleeping on the floor of a cell...absolutely sickening.
He died a few years later, stomach cancer. He was a great man. I miss him.
p.s. I also have a story of that same department doing me great justice, so keep in mind that it was the two assholes who responded, not the entire sheriff's office that was to blame.
Some of those deputies were good people who saved my ass a few times, let me off the hook a few times, etc. I will say that I'm glad to have moved, though.
