If I may ask, why is this one not on the front page? It seems to offer something significantly different that that older link which only links to an article indexing police brutality against journalists, while this is against all people. It appears to have enough upvotes to be on the front page - did some other part of the weighting system bump it off or is there a manual flag/bump on it?
Appreciate all your efforts here and hope that doesn't come off as confrontational or accusatory.
We downweighted it as a follow-up submission [1]. Follow-ups are by definition repetitive, and repetition goes against curiosity which is the root principle here [2].
I'm sorry, because this seems like a good project, and as a reader I approve. But as a moderator, the perspective is different—the quesiton is always, is there enough SNI (significant new information [3]) to support a significantly different discussion? in this case vis-à-vis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393914, which has been on the front page all day? The answer seems to be no, because the comments in this thread aren't about the specifics of the repository—they're just about the general topic of police brutality. In other words this thread just gets sucked into the stronger gravitational field of the more generic topic, which unfortunately is what happens to most posts that fly too close to a large hot planet (i.e. a hot ongoing thread).
All that said, I'm tempted to contradict myself ("very well then I contradict myself") and dump the other thread in favor of this one, because I can feel there's something interesting here. So how about a compromise: if someone still feels like this post is interesting after, say, two weeks have gone by, they can email hn@ycombinator.com and we can arrange a repost. I was originally going to say one week, but that's sort of on the cusp between now and the future. Two weeks is more on the future side.
Just a heads-up: before you get angry, bear in mind the situation is evolving and that the context and the timing information are very relevant. Here's why: at least in NYC, I know the protest leaders and the NYPD police chief got together just a day or two ago to have a dialog and try to mend things so they can work together instead of against each other. [1] They don't hate each other, and in any case, both sides realize they need the other's support. They just want to be able to work together to keep things peaceful. And it seems like they're giving each other another chance to do things right, and it's important that they get that chance instead of having more tensions flare again as a result of anger from 3 days ago.
So, before you get worked up about what happened, check the date, and try to see if there's any local news in the city that might indicate something might have changed in the meantime. You won't necessarily see these on frontpage headlines, so it might take a bit of digging. (I've found actual videos from local news reporting on the ground much more helpful than textual articles from national outlets here. It seems to me it's just too difficult to capture all the relevant dynamics, emotion, and nuance in text.)
In fact, if anyone's involved, I would suggest putting this information in the repo here as well. You don't want to add fuel onto a fire that was already under control a few days ago, and you want to know when (or whether) good progress is being made. Ultimately the goal is to find a working model that others can hopefully emulate.
While coming to the table is important and I think reacting thoughtfully to this is important, I think it's important to note that these incidents of police brutality are being documented a lot more due to the current events and scale but these are far from isolated to these protests. It's simply much easier to avoid being recorded in day to day life while everyone has their cameras out for these.
As far as rational, controlled, and motivated anger goes, what day these events happen on should not stand in the way. This needs to be harnessed to enact massive structural change of course, not online flame wars or unproductive methods of protest. Still, that very anger you see is also able to be used to motivate many people to add in ways they may not have before. White people are starting to understand that they can be used as literal shields [1] against police brutality, and that should not be lost in this. There is much to be gained in a positive way from this anger.
I do appreciate your general sentiment here, I just wanted to underscore that the anger here, particularly that felt by POC, has deep roots beyond these incidents and can be used positively. I think that caveat is where we agree - how to harness that anger.
> Just a heads-up: before you get angry, bear in mind the situation is evolving and that the context and the timing information are very relevant.
"Before you get angry about police brutality, remember context is important!" Are you serious?! Some people are talking to the police chief so you shouldn't be angry that they are blockading people on to a bridge. Or angry that they are driving SUVs into people. Or violently pushing people to the ground. And that's just the NYPD. A department where the commissioner was praising the department for their restrain, if that's restrain wait until they stop holding back.
Giving each other the chance to do the right thing? What are you talking about? What do the protesters need to do? Stop proetesting?
> So, before you get worked up about what happened, check the date, and try to see if there's any local news in the city that might indicate something might have changed in the meantime
> So, before you get worked up about what happened, check the date, and try to see if there's any local news in the city that might indicate something might have changed in the meantime. You won't necessarily see these on frontpage headlines, so it might take a bit of digging. (I've found actual videos from local news reporting on the ground much more helpful than textual articles from national outlets here. It seems to me it's just too difficult to capture all the relevant dynamics, emotion, and nuance in text.)
Are you nuts? So if it happened 3 days ago and the police are saying sorry but not laying charges, it's a-ok? There are no real nuances here. You have police shooting rubber bullets are people's faces, spraying them with pepper spray while they have their hands up, tear gassing people. All while not facing criminal charges.
> In fact, if anyone's involved, I would suggest putting this information in the repo here as well. You don't want to add fuel onto a fire that was already under control a few days ago, and you want to know when (or whether) good progress is being made. Ultimately the goal is to find a working model that others can hopefully emulate.
No, you want to add fuel to this fire if you want this problem to be solved. Working models can be found in nearly every civilised country in the world.
Stop telling people not to be angry and start being angry.
You know a 77 year old retired cop was killed in St. Louis last night, holding his cell phone to call police about looters. You gonna protest his death too? Or do you just want an endless vicious cycle of blood feuds for the next 3000 years?
Clearly that is wrong too, but you know, two wrongs don't make a right. And a major difference is that violence against police actually is prosecuted unlike the opposite.
You got a lot of mental gymnastics to squirm out of your culpability for perpetrating hate towards the 99.9% of cops who do their job ethically. But you got no words for a dead man who served his community for 40+ years and meets a fate like this thanks to instigators and rioters who claim they're for justice.
Getting angry could cause more innocent people to get killed. Some are working towards a better future in these protests. Others are just getting inflamed and doing things they might regret.
> Getting angry could cause more innocent people to get killed. Some are working towards a better future in these protests. Others are just getting inflamed and doing things they might regret.
Well, isn't this the entire point. The police are killing innocent people. Protesters aren't killing anyone. Seems like even more of a reason to be angry.
HN, I’m always wary of people who attempt to
steer my emotions like the poster above. The person who killed Floyd does not represent the entire police department, just like the people who are looting do not represent all of the protesters. You have extremists on both sides trying to make you pick a side, when the truth lies between.
> The person who killed Floyd does not represent the entire police department, just like the people who are looting do not represent all of the protesters.
Focusing it on one single act tries to negate the point. It's not just a single act. It's multiple acts, on a daily basis. The police are arresting journalists live on air. For failing to obey commands that weren't given. They shot at other journalists on air. If that's what they're doing on the air.
There is no dispute in police brutality, the police do not deny it, the protesters do not deny it. So why would the truth lie in between an agreed-upon truth?
That was in the context to what the person above you wrote:
> Getting angry could cause more innocent people to get killed. Some are working towards a better future in these protests. Others are just getting inflamed and doing things they might regret.
Adding emotive fuel will only cause more harm
...to which, you called for more anger and adding fuel to the fire.
As I’ve already identified above, the two extreme forces are the violent law enforcers who abuse their power and the arsonist protestors who are looting and vandalizing businesses as some kind of retribution. Both extremists are unjustifiable. It’s good they don’t represent the majority. It’d also be good if we were to not let them represent the agency ... and, frankly, to have control over our prejudices and our anger.
The protesters are doing great. Some of those involved in riots are getting close. Some of the beatings will have caused some life long injuries. The people that drove up and shot dead a security guard have killed.
I just think a degree of restraint is required to avoid innocent people getting hurt.
> The people that drove up and shot dead a security guard have killed.
What security guard. I googled this since I haven't heard anything about it and it seems that it happened in Flint on the 6th of May before the protests and was about face masks and not police brutality. Or are you talking about a different murder? At first glance, this just seems like misinformation.
> Oakland police, who are assisting the FBI in the investigation, tweeted a statement Friday night saying the shooting appeared to be unrelated to the protest over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
With respect, the poster correctly quoted you, using the punctuation common here to indicate a direct quote, and then provided an interpretation using punctuation common here specifically to indicate text that is not a direct quote. I think I have more sympathy with your point of view but before getting angry you ought to consider the context of a persons actions.
> [...] then provided an interpretation using punctuation common here specifically to indicate text that is not a direct quote.
When I see people see double-quotes following a block quote, they're there to indicate that the following sentence(s) is about that specific portion of the larger quote... not to indicate deliberate misquotes.
In any case... every alteration he made to that quote resulted in a substantive difference to the thoughts and tone of my message. Including the sarcastic exclamation point he took the liberty to insert at the end. Maybe on a good day I'd have the energy to entertain it, but with everything being draining enough as is, I just don't have enough time or energy to reply to something that makes a mockery of something I'm already shedding tears on.
It's hard to believe that report when it doesn't name any of the people or organizations they met with. As far as I know, the protesters don't have any leaders that could negotiate on their behalf.
I don't know, maybe he's wrong about them being leaders. I'm happy to read more information about this; I just don't have more info unfortunately. Does it really matter if they're leaders or not though? It's not like it doesn't count if the situation improves without the leaders being involved, or without us knowing what their names might be.
Thanks for doing that, during the Hong Kong protests the (presumably) CCP were attacking doing ddos attacks and trying attack servers that hosted footage of the police illegally beating, arresting and pepper spraying lawful citizens protesting or simply just having the misfortune of being around one when the HKPF/PLA decided to get violent.
Here is the torrent hash if anyone wants to host it and seed:
9b85dd223c8f92c923f516ed77bbdfcb770f4dd8
> I vouched for this. In other threads, an attitude I've seen is "well I'm just a tech worker, what can I possibly do to help?"
I hope something like this is done for these protests (Anonymous?) and undertaken by the greater tech community as the Police need to be held accountable for the brutality and callous inhumane behaviour towards citizens and journalists alike, that many on here simply accepted 'as other people's problems.' And in many cities the police have simply decided of their own accord to just shut off their bodycams. I spent most of the weekend following the events and after you weed through the BS bots, you actually see the numbers are there to make it happen in just about every city. It's really just a matter of coordination and Will.
If nothing else this is a stark reminder of what your tax money is going towards, and it isn't going towards roads, schools or whatever absurd notion most use to justify the ever growing militarization and expansion of a Police State in the US.
The thing I don't get was that in the late 80s and 90s activism and tech/hacking oriented people were pretty much one and the same, namely Cypherpunks. Specifically in the Valley!
> The thing I don't get was that in the late 80s and 90s activism and tech/hacking oriented people were pretty much one and the same, namely Cypherpunks. Specifically in the Valley!
Alot of those folks were co-opted… at least according to folks like Bill Blunden (belowgotham.com) and John Young (cryptome.org)
> Alot of those folks were co-opted… at least according to folks like Bill Blunden (belowgotham.com) and John Young (cryptome.org)
I don't know who those people are, nor have I taken the time to analyze their work. But let's assume that some were co-opted, you do realize that ultimately it doesn't matter because the few that weren't are responsible for some of the greatest innovation in citizen's use of cryptography and a non-state issue currency, those being: Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, Adam Back, Timothy May.
Hell, these people inspired a certain loud mouth Cyberpunk who went on to create wikileaks, and tried to expose covert Nuclear armament by the US prior to that, you may have heard of him as he's currently being used as political football in an extradition case: Julian Assange. And he motivated a guy who went to to work on TOR (Jacob Applebaum) and a former NSA contractor that revealed the extensive abuses of the the Intelligence Agencies around the world (Edward Snowden).
What I'm getting at is that these kind of movements are useful precisely because they do not rely on a single entity or person to steer the actions of said movement.
> What I'm getting at is that these kind of movements are useful precisely because they do not rely on a single entity or person to steer the actions of said movement.
I don't disagree, I'm just not as surprised as you are that things have changed from the 80/90's… the stakes are higher… and the name of the game is "dealing with the metadata killchain", building it, or both ;)
Also just in general, make sure the people around you are registered to vote, get absentee ballots if they need them, understand how to complete, and send them. Make sure they vote.
I'm not gonna tell you how to vote. I will only tell you to exercise your civic duty. We are all smart people here: to wield both the abstract and pragmatic concerns into a decision. Make it. It may be the last we get to make.
A laudable idea but why restrict it to the protests? There's a problem with police brutality in lots of places and at lots of times (even just the perception of it), perhaps a more standard way to report and record which can be replicated easily and hence, compared better, might be an idea. (As I was writing an issue opened up on this kind of point https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/issues/83)
It seems to me that the current set up excludes the vast majority of people (who are unlikely to know markdown, Git, or Github) which limits its effectiveness.
Right now there is so much first person documentation of these acts pouring into Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat's Map, and Tiktok. This is the time to make sure there is a simple way to document all of this so it can be organized later. System perfection is the enemy of preservation here. Anything helps and taking time to make those UI layers could lose valuable documentation in the shuffle.
Git's UI will absolutely limit the contributing audience, I agree - Perhaps the author could add a simple form for people to submit through and then technical people could manually add them? Google Form/Jotform/Survey Monkey style?
(Not the author) I like Git for the decentralization and ease of someone backing it all up. Agree that there's a huge usability cliff for anyone outside our circle that wants to contribute.
Maybe a good add-on project for someone is creating a website where potential new incidents can be submitted and evaluated, then pulled into the repo automatically if they pass muster.
If Reddit wasn't censored, you could use that, but you'd need moderators to manage duplicates and spam. Backing up Reddit pages / posts / videos should be fairly straightforward. If anything it's a lot more accessible to anyone because you can e.g. post from mobile.
I see an umbrella put way over the fence. I see a policeman grab an umbrella that was way over fence. I see then someone else reach across the fence in response to the police grabbing the umbrella. I see the police then react to that person reaching across the fence.
I don't see blame. I just see tinder, a spark, and an escalation.
I'm fully 100% for "Black Lives Matter" and 100% against police brutality and the militarization of the police. But that video is too ambiguous convince all people. It's the same with the CNN reporter. People who want to see racism see a black reporter get arrested. People who don't want to see racism see 3 people getting arrested, one black, one white, one latino? Yes, racism exists but that video is also not proof of it.
You see an attempted robbery resulting in the destruction of someone's private property.
> I see then someone else reach
You see a person trying to hold onto their property as they're pulled over the fence because a cop just assaulted them.
> I see the police then react
You see the police immediately start spraying and bombing and gassing, with the flimsiest excuse, an entire crowd of people who are literally just chanting.
This coordinated initiation of violence is extremely typical from the police playbook. Watch this third video from 26:30 as the filmer explains the meaning of a "posture" change when the police swap in gasmask brutes in place of the bicycle cops who were standing there before, showing that they planned to escalate from the beginning. https://www.facebook.com/omarisal/videos/10220021035848747/
Holy crap, that last video was eye opening and horrendous to watch. The police basically assaulted that person for holding an umbrella, then that person was obviously surprised and didn't want to let go of their umbrella, probably didn't even realize why it was getting pulled out of their hands. The police responded by pepper spraying everyone. It's incredibly obvious that this started because the officer aggressively grabbed that umbrella for no reason, and the crowd gets pepper sprayed.
Along with bringing in the heavy duty officers just moments before this happens, it's obvious that they just wanted an excuse to bring in their weapons
The aerial video doesn't help at all. If you're being unkind to the protesters then the ground level video shows a protester shoving an umbrella in a policeman's face which is the start of the entire thing. The policeman reacts as anyone would when someone shoves something in their face, they grab/bat it away. That causes others to reach over the fence which would appear threatening and then the spray starts.
If you're assuming good intentions on the part of that protestor then the umbrella being over the fence and in the face of an officer was just an accident of being too close the fence so that their umbrella ended up in the police officer's face. The result is the same, the protester is crossing the line like the "I'm not touching you" meme. The officer has an umbrella shoved in their face and they react.
From the officer's POV this (https://pasteboard.co/Jbm1UXn.jpg) is a protester trying to intentionally block their view or just annoy them.
I know you won't accept that interpretation as remotely valid because you've already decided there is only one correct way to see it.
I'm not placing blame and I'm not defending the police. I'm just pointing out your interpretation of what happened is just that, an interpretation. There is at least one other perfectly valid interpretation.
You can see the kid reach for the officer. The officer reacted. Whether it was actually a threat I have no idea. The officer is trying to pass. The kid effectively corners him into a wall, intentionally or not, and then reaches toward the officer. Maybe it was supposed to be a friendly tap on the upper arm but in the middle of such a situation it's not hard to believe whatever the kid reached for felt like a threat to the officer.
Again I'm not trying to defend the police but if you want people to come together, if you want that 1/2 of the nation that's on the wrong side to support your cause, then you need less ambiguous examples. Otherwise it's just easy to dismiss it.
Other than taking the kid down there is no visible brutality in that video.
You're doing a great job of it anyway trying to justify marching in brutes covered head to toe in armor all prepared for a gas attack and then mysteriously "reacting" to an _umbrella_ a minute later by bombing a crowd of people standing around chanting.
You're doing some heavy concern trolling here. I see you.
> The kid effectively corners him into a wall
If I push between you and the wall, you have not cornered me into the wall. The person who pushes in is responsible for being there.
> Whether it was actually a threat I have no idea
Kid has a phone in one hand and sunglasses in the other. If you have no idea then you're intentionally not paying attention.
> Other than taking the kid down there is no visible brutality
Other than the visible brutality, there is no visible brutality. Well, by _that_ definition...
I'm not trolling and dang should have banned banned your message for name calling.
There is no brutality in that video. The officers wraps his arm around the kid and pulls him to the ground slowly and safely. There is no evidence in that video the kid got a single scratch or bruise. If there is evidence of actual violence it's not in that video.
Putting someone into a headlock and dragging them around by their neck when that person had not initiated violence is brutality. And that person clearly did not initiate violence.
> The officers wraps his arm around the kid
Sure, a gentle loving caress around the neck, and then a gentle loving pull by the neck, and then gently and lovingly putting him to the ground by the neck.
> There are videos of actual violence.
Both are videos of actual violence. Thank you for sharing that one.
Violence: Behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.
There is no intent to hurt, damage, or kill that kid and there is no evidence in the video of the cop on a bicycle taking down the kid that the kid was remotely hurt. Unlike other videos. So no, it is not actual violence.
And, no I'm not getting hung up on the word "intent". I'm pointing out if there is no actual hurt or damage then it's not violence.
As for the kids intent or the officer's perceived intent we'll never know unless the officer has a body cam and even if we did different people will likely see it differently just like the umbrella above. You see an innocent girl with an umbrella. Others see a girl intentionally putting her umbrella in the face of an officer and blocking his view effectively obstructing an officer. When he takes the umbrella clearly in his face people react and things escalate.
In any case you, and all the other downvoters, seemed to miss the entire point of my comments.
The point is there are multiple ways to see those videos. You claiming there is only one is about as relevant as telling someone their feelings are wrong. You can't tell someone else how they feel and you can't tell someone else what they see in those videos. If you showed those videos to 100 people and found that 50% (or even 20%) saw something different your rage that they didn't see the exact same thing you saw would not help you convince them they're wrong. If instead you understand those videos are actually not strong proof of your case you'd drop them for videos that are and therefore make your case better and help bring about the change you (and me) want to see.
Am I the only one that gets the feeling these riots have nothing to do with George Floyd at this point and are just a massive boiling over of tension from Coronavirus lockdown orders?
Of course it's about a lot more than George Floyd; he was just the latest and most undeniable of a long string of racist policing. People never had a chance to calm down from Breonna Taylor's murder or Ahmaud Arbery or that woman who tried to get police to attack a man in Central Park because he was black, the day before the murder of Floyd.
The protests have been greatly enhanced and made far stronger by the ridiculous amount of police violence. Without that, and without the continued racist action of the Minneapolis police, DA, and even medical examiner.
Ferguson wasn't that long ago, and everything is worse since then. I'm not surprised that it's this big.
I think that and the resulting unemployment boom certainly contributes, but you seem to miss the obvious point here - that the Black and Brown people of US have other objective reasons to protest about, too.
> that the Black and Brown people of US have other objective reasons to protest about, too.
Speaking as a brown person, I am seeing a lot of white people in masks burning down and looting the livelihoods of black and brown business owners. I think I remember having read about something like this having happened before in history.
Many of those white people arrested for said looting have been tied back to white supremacists groups who seem to be trying to discredit the protestors.
> Editor’s note: St. Paul Mayor and Governor Tim Walz on Sunday backed down from their claims on Saturday that 80% of those arrested for looting were from out of state or out of town. They still stressed that “bad actors” from outside the cities played a significant role in the destruction.
I think this is mostly wishful thinking, by people who are too horrified to admit that their tribe can be doing bad and so blame “outsiders”.
I don't think anybody supporting the protesters is horrified that some of the "legitimate" protesters are looting. They're more horrified by the systematic abuse and lack of accountability that has sparked these protests.
Your insistence on focusing on the violence is a cheap distraction.
> Signs of any organized effort or even participation in the violence were relatively rare. “I have not seen any clear evidence that white supremacists or militiamen are masking up and going out to burn and loot,” said Howard Graves, a research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center who tracks white supremacist and other anti-government extremist groups.
> said Howard Graves, a research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center
Appeal to authority
Your "source" does not cite sources or factual data, just an observation from someone. Your post and that piece of the NYT article holds no water because of the logical fallacies.
White supremacists or militiamen (that can be specifically identified as such) no, but there seem to be a suspiciously high number of videos showing masked up young white kids who are cleary instigating destruction, and encouraging others to do so.
How true is all this? We'll likely never know, but it seems odd that the media and FBI seem to have very little interest in this very plausible scenario.
In my experience, "masked young white kids who instigate destruction" have been a constant presence at protests for quite a while now, and the same debate about their motivations occurs every single time.
I don't doubt that in some cases, provocateurs and false flag actors exist, but there's definitely a not insubstantial amount of anarchist-leaning folks who are acting genuinely.
The important thing to consider, in my mind, is whether your attention should be focused on a relatively small amount of property damage and looting, or the many, many examples of physical violence against people committed by police. Property damage is almost always a distraction, and is often intentionally used as one.
> The important thing to consider, in my mind, is whether your attention should be focused on a relatively small amount of property damage and looting, or the many, many examples of physical violence against people committed by police. Property damage is almost always a distraction, and is often intentionally used as one.
That's the very point people are speculating about.
I for one am happy to see the instigators get stopped, scolded and told off, etc. I've seen a clip today where some guy rocks up in a car to set off some fireworks, said fireworks gets yote back in his car. Another kid with his phone out tried to get people to tip a car over, he was hounded off.
Why do protestors have to ensure some bad actors that try to hide amongst them don't take advantage of the situation? Causing destruction for a laugh is what the police is doing already.
That’s fake news.. The coordinated effort to loot/riot with violent means is backed by Antifa. There is a lot of evidence of crates of bricks “left” at distinct corner locations. More recently, crates of pipe bombs were found in DC.
I wouldn’t so much call them white supremacists but anarchists.
Who / where is antifa? Is it an actual organization or just a blanket statement to turn a group of people into boogeymen with a vaguely ominous sounding name?
That's great; where's your source. Give us something, any kind of specific evidence that points to Antifa; otherwise you're just pissing in the wind like all the other speculators and liars.
How does anyone watch these scenes and perform the mental gymnastics required to believe all the rioting and looting was secretly done by white supremacists?
If you are using these videos as evidence to make a racist point, then yeah it would be racist.
I provide these videos in hopes people will knock it off with the conspiracy theories about white people being the ones rioting and looting. Police brutality disproportionately affect black and brown people. So why is it wrong to think that it would be mainly black and brown people who would be angered and go on a rioting/looting spree to lash out against the oppressors?
It makes total sense. However, the looting being justified by some is totally inane in my opinion. How does robbing Jordans bring back dead folk? Especially when Jordans themselves are from Nike who partners with many black athletes.. And the protests have now become cover, consuming police resources while the looters destroy cities with fire, theft, violence, and chaos. The looters are just opportunistic vultures - they literally cleaned out all of SoHo and 34st street in NYC, ran over and shot cops, set fire to tons of buildings, even residences. They bring nothing but disdain for black folk..considering like you said..the demographic of the looters is mostly black.
It doesn't make sense to protest any more, in person, if you are helping looters destroy your local economy in an already bad recession by occupying an already taxed and outnumbered police force.
In NYC, many looters are coming down from their residences in Harlem and the Bronx, many brazenly by car, often with fake or covered plates, and raiding stores in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. There is no logistical targeting of large corporate properties. Everything from the corner store to local eateries is being smashed, grabbed, and burned. Many local store owners had their safes stolen.
The looters are motivated by selfish greed and clearly have an affinity for the most expensive commodities ie. Nike, Apple, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Rolex. But they still aren't surgically striking - the picture you falsely paint.
Many are even dumb enough to indiscriminantly destroy their own local neighborhoods, targeting both small and large businesses.[1,2]
Now, why would any outside investor, or even a poor entrepreneur who lives in the area, invest in the area, knowing that this infantile us vs them, poor vs businesses is going to be dominant narrative and zeitgeist of that area's people?
Investors wont take the same chances again if they are unappreciatively and scornfully seen as "rich man building a starbucks where it doesn't belong."
The people from these areas claim they want prosperity but deface and burn down anything with a mediocrum of betterment. By process of elimination, they want a poor uninvested area. Their message rang loud and clear in the last week: do not build nice things because then you are a "no-face corporate capitalist."
Wide scale police brutality and a lack of accountability or change over 30 years+. Rodney King. Ferguson. The countless names and incidents in between. In my hometown, there was a young black man shot 17 times in the back that sparked local protests just like these where tear gas was also deployed. That was 15 years ago now. This story has looked the same and nothing has changed, and we are finally seeing it boil over at a national level.
A nit: I think it's safe to say the brutality and lack of accountability has been baked into the system from the start. It's only recently that we've been able to record and share it.
I grew up with a guy who was murdered by cops because he.... woke up when they confronted him about why he was sleeping behind the wheel of his car. His kids have been growing up without a father or his income. Death by cop in Mississippi isn't going to win you any civil cases.
100% agreed, I tried to highlight that with the + but I think this nit is helpful and will hopefully flag this for people who might not think back to that type of history, like how sheriffs were originally created to track down runaway slaves. Perhaps this showing of true colors is just underscoring their original purpose and how little the system and culture within it has changed.
At this point, if that's all you've seen, it's because you aren't looking.
So maybe look up videos of cops shooting journalists, smashing windows, bashing people in the face when they weren't doing anything, and running people over with their cars. There are literally hundreds of such videos from the past few days.
Then you'd be able to say you've seen videos of things other than white kids throwing bricks.
Woh, crazy, did you see that cop rush the news cameraman after like 3 minutes of peaceful protests and literally bash him in the face? Man I'd look like such an asshole if I'd just bet that videos of this don't exist! Glad I didn't do that, I would feel just soooooo stupid! Like a real Grade A dumbass, that's for sure!
I mean, the United States is predominantly white. It's nearly certain that most people on video will be white, as a result. Also, the presence of white people does not negate that the protests are about black lives (not COVID). I won't engage with the statement about bricks because another user has that covered.
Many of my black friends don't like the idea that the protests are about COVID tensions (even if income inequality and unemployment obviously contribute). It's felt like an erasure of their struggle. I'm Hispanic and have been profiled a few times in my life. While I cannot pretend to know the full spectrum of the black experience in the US, I'm inclined to agree that I feel similar, too.
Edit: no clue why this keeps getting downvoted. The protests are (1) not only about COVID and (2) implying that they're only about COVID feels like erasure to Black (and Brown) people. Unless I'm missing something, here. Perhaps I need to be more detailed?
The entire point of this protest is to be heard. There is a population, long silenced, that has a message to convey. Today that message is BLM - and it is incredibly taxing to convey that message. To then look that movement in the eye and completely miss the message, returns us to square one: the problem of being unheard. That is what I mean by "a feeling of erasure."
This strikes me as too simplistic solution. I tried to find papers on how demonstrations become riots, but my google.scholar-fu has failed. Anyone got good review papers on this? (If none exist, there is a goldmine there for social scientists.)
Anecdotal, but in my country there's been large scale protests that proceeded peacefully because the police didn't step in to antagonize the people, even if they were in their rights to do so because of the coronavirus measures.
In 1773, King George was upping taxes while not providing adequate representation. Colonists thought this was an abuse of power, so they robbed and looted a huge boat filled with tea, which set off events that led to the American Revolution. Look it up, I'm sure there's a wikipedia article or something, it's pretty famous event in history.
Good call. This would be the second part to study 'how riots escalate to revolution'. First things first; from demonstration to riots.
Which book and author would you suggest? (Wiki, I've already read and it had little about the actual mechanism.
They did not rob or loot. They destroyed the tea, and only the tea, which belonged to the East India Company, a defacto arm of the UK government. They did not steal any tea. They did not break anything else.
I haven't done as much reading on the subject as I'd like, but I thought "Policing as a causal factor" by Axel Klien (2011) to be interesting. The basic idea was that underlying societal issues are necessary, but the actual civil unrest is usually precipitated by a specific case of police over reach
I think the social contract for many were broken during lockdown, however the lockdown protests were allowed to continue peacefully. There was no major attempt to forcibly end them and no major case of loss of life or injury to propel the protest into true rioting.
My current mental model is that rioring both needs a reactant, but also a catalyst. Imo there was plenty of reactant sitting the lockdown protests, but no catalyst.
My thinking on the matter will likely change as I learn more.
And to answer your question literally: no, I wasn't really thinking about riots then
For me, it's the fact that police stood on some guys neck while he begged them to stop because he couldn't breathe.
Those sorts of things make me cranky. I suspect other people might feel the same way. Especially seeing as it's only the latest in a string of deaths like this.
I highly recommend watching it even if you don't like or usually don't agree with him. He frames this as a row of dominoes and the societal contract that black people constantly see violated.
I'd say it's that, plus tensions manufactured by social media and angry clickbait, plus a general sense of increasing income inequality. Humans are sadly well-attuned to how well-off their fellow humans are.
I don't think people are protesting against lockdown orders per se, but it's hard deny that the protests are getting huge crowds because people are (1) incredibly bored, and (2) have no job or school to go to instead.
(Not to deny the sentiment or validity of the protests -- maybe in an ideal world, the protestors would have gone otherwise, but IRL, would have been tired, bogged down in work or school, or otherwise distracted with life. Which currently doesn't exist).
And it's a good thing the Mongol Horde didn't have airplanes, or we'd all be drinking fermented horse milk with dinner. Guess technology really does change area of influence, don't it?
When bellies are full and few hands are idle its easier to overlook the daily injustice. That said, the tensions aren't new and they aren't diminished or invalid either.
They are certainly extremely tied to C19, 'nothing to do with' is wrong.
I think the George Floyd killing is tied to C19 in it's extremity. To keep going like they did with vocal witnesses is very unusual.
The lockdown has affected both the police and public in a psychological way. We allowed ourselves to be locked up. At many levels our brains aren't happy.
Wearing masks has created change in protests and the way police act. It's anonymousing attackers and the attacked are also less human.
Uh, nobody questioned that you've got trigger-happy and overgeared specialists on a powertrip.
That's not what CRS/Bereitschaftspolizei is though. I've only ever seen them running around entirely without protection or with shields to stop people doing dumb shit.
It is not SWAT, it is police forces trained especially to keep protest from degenerating. Negotiator able to defuse situations, will only charge or fire (with water cannons or rubber bullets) on order but have the right to refuse them if they feel the situation can be calmed down.
Probably a bit of a controversial opinion but in some cases I can sympathize with the police officers. The reality is that the vast majority of them likely condemn the events around George Floyd's death. They are also regular people with families, children and friends they have to provide for. And they have the exact same problems that many of us do. Their daily work involves keeping things in order, which is something I respect. That said, the first video I opened at random[1] shows a small number of people blocking a road in what looks more like a civil war scene rather than a protest. And the authorities are greeted with "F-U" and people tossing objects at them. The people in uniforms are ordinary people. Put yourself in their shoes and tell me: having all the problems you have, seeing all the destruction, which in all cases is no longer a protest, people shouting "f-u" and throwing stuff at you: You can be the most mentally stable human being but everyone has a limit. Many of those men are possibly working overtime, in extreme conditions and I bet they would much rather be with their kids or sick parents for instance. With this idea in mind, I personally can't picture myself being able to remain calm and not overstep my boundaries sooner or later.
Now putting myself in the shoes of the protesters: seeing the same destruction, destroying of properties, cars and businesses, I'll call it a day because this is no longer a protest. I'd go back home and wait for this to be taken care of and join a civilized protest once this has been taken care of. A civilized country should be able to hold a civilized protest. And having spent most of my life in eastern Europe, you can say I know a thing or two about protests. Last large protest I was a part of was in ~2013 irrc and the aftermath was very different. The night after each of those protests, everything was spotless clean, people thew all their garbage in the bins, nothing broken or destroyed. People were coming with their children and pets and being completely comfortable with it. There was a completely unrelated incident of a gas explosion at a Chinese restaurant, which burned a nearby shop. People gathered donations fo the shop owner to recover. Incidents with police? Practically none during ~3 months of daily protest. And we are talking eastern Europe - the police officers are anything but the nicest people on the planet.
I think most of what you’re saying is not controversial, but I think you’re missing a lot of context. Those officers, and the protestors, exist in a country that still treats black people as second-class citizens in a variety of ways. Hell, the current President spent years saying the previous (black) President was illegitimate.
You want to see the protesters and officers as equal, but they’re not - the protesters are trying to change the status quo, the officers by and large want it to stay the way it is, and often want to make things worse for minorities (“Make America Great Again”).
Sympathy for the officers is fine, but remember they can quit whenever they want. Black people can’t quit being black.
As an outsider (maybe I am wrong) US will continue their bad treatment of 'black people' as long as you continue calling them 'black' and supporting it at the official level. It is just racial segregation in disguise.
And looking at the images of complete destruction, who do you think is the big winner here? Isn't it Mr. "Make America Great again"? I think that's playing beautifully in his hands and many of the people who had turned against him are now back under his wing.
> Sympathy for the officers is fine, but remember they can quit whenever they want.
That's not always the case. As I said, often those people have to provide for someone and put food on the table each night. I know exactly what it is to be a kid and seeing an empty table in the evening.
> A civilized country should be able to hold a civilized protest.
The protests started out peaceful but became less peaceful when the police showed up and tear gassed innocent crowds. There's people literally getting arrested for practicing their right to assemble and right to freedom of speech.
I witnessed this in Portland over the last 5 days.
The Portland police bureau came out to the game locked and loaded, full riot gear, trucks modified to hold ten cops hanging on the outside, tear gas, flash bangs, pepper balls, rubber bullets, riot batons, helicopters, spotlights. And, they decide to starts gassing protesters half an hour before curfew begins...
Protests started loud but moderately peaceful; no thrown objects, no fires, no damaged buildings. Cops tear gas and shoot them for "obstructing traffic". After a few hours of this, the crowd starts throwing water bottles, breaking windows, hurling the tear gas grenades back. This back and forth goes on through Sunday night.
Portland mayor Ted Wheeler gets a LOT of flack from important people who spent their weekend coughing on tear gas and waking up to sirens, painful screaming, and flashbangs, instead of drinking fine wine at nice restaurants and walking the Pearl District. He tells the cops no more violent riot control measures.
Monday night hits, something like 10,000 protesters take the streets and bridges, organized, geared up with cones, leaf blowers, shields, gas masks, body armor. The cops stay put. They don't even come out of their staging area. Protesters spend the evening chanting, talking to passersby, and policing bald headed agent provacateurs wearing German camo to hide their swastika tats. It was beautiful, the air was breathable, and there were no reports of looting or damage.
That is the thing about collectivism though. Imagine one person throwing a bottle from the crowd at the police(something which can be seen in tons of videos). The idea of collectivism implies that the crowd itself is no longer innocent at that point. Not to mention the destruction of public and private properties. The words "rights" and "responsibilities" go hand in hand and people love ignoring that fact.
> That is the thing about collectivism though. Imagine one person throwing a bottle from the crowd at the police(something which can be seen in tons of videos). The idea of collectivism implies that the crowd itself is no longer innocent at that point.
You are confusing the idea of collectivism (in which each individual is responsible for the welfare of the members of the group, and is expected to sacrifice to some extent—different variations on collectivism vary on the extent—their own welfare for the common good) with the concept of collective punishment (a widely recognized violation of human rights and, in the context of armed conflict, a war crime, in which members of a group are punished for mere shared membership in a group which contains wrongdoers, without any evidence of collaboration in or support for the wrongdoing.)
A mass protest is by all means a form of collectivism. Everyone has the right to protest and everyone has the responsibility to keep it civilized. Collective punishment may be a violation of human right and it should be condemned but what is your solution when you have the manpower of say 1,000 people vs a crowd of 100,000 and your task is to make sure that the city is still there the next morning? Just do the math.
> A mass protest is by all means a form of collectivism.
No, it's not. Participation in a mass protest may be motivated by collectivist ideals, or it can be motivated by the individualist ideal that it is better to discourage a government course of action that could in the future be of grave danger to you individually, and that the immediate risk of participation in the protest is less than the long-term risk of the policy being protested against.
People of ideologized strictly and emphatically opposed to collectivism engage in mass protests.
> Collective punishment may be a violation of human right [...]
> what is your solution when [...] your task is to make sure that the city is still there the next morning?
The legitimate task of the police is to protect the rights of all (innocent, suspect, and even, except to the extent specifically and legitimately deprived due to their guilt, the guilty). There is no circumstances when participation in a gross abuse of human rights is within the scope of their legitimate task.
My point is that it isn't black and white scenario. Make no mistakes, there are policemen who are nothing more than organic waste, I've had encounters with such: I was pulled out of a car by the neck, tossed on the ground by 4 heavily armed policemen while they completely thrashed my car. Did I get a "We're sorry" after they figured out that I was not the guy they were after? No, I literally got "GTFO NOW". But... Let's stick to the math.
You've provided the theory, but you didn't answer my practical question: you have 1000 people representing authority and 100,000 people crowd. Let's say 4% of that crowd is violent. That is still 4 times your capacity. All while a large number of the remaining 96k are shouting at you. Put yourself in the shoes of those 1000 and your task being "restore order". In which case, the ball is in the crowd's yard. As an outside spectator(and someone who literally grew up in the epicenter of daily protests as a child), what I'm seeing here is the recent South Park episode turning into a documentary.
It's really easy to quote laws and rules, but in the real world, they are not always applicable. And in the case of mass gatherings, they are hardly ever applicable. Are you seriously suggesting that you were never put in a position where your only course of action was to grossly break the rules? If so, I envy you, I really do. No one hates breaking the rules more than I do but on many occasions in life, I've had to. It doesn't have to do with how rules and laws are defined or implemented. It's simple math: you have two bricks and three holes to fill, otherwise your house will flood. It's the same story with the pandemic - no one wants lockdowns or businesses crashing but it's either that or the death of millions.
And any time the police "punish" the entire crowd, rather than the individuals who do the acts, that's called collective punishment. It's a favorite tactic of sociopaths and bullys.
Question for you regarding your usage of collectivism though: You say you have empathy for the police. Yet by your own definition of collectivism, the crowd is no longer innocent the moment they're attacking the police.
Why are you not applying the same logic to the police state? The police murdered George Floyd, so doesn't that imply the police are no longer innocent at this point? Why is only one side beholden to rights and responsibilities? At that point isn't it your obligation to stand up to a group becoming criminal?
You are over-simplifying things way too much. Derek Chauvin, along with the officers accompanying him are collectively guilty. In my view, equally guilty. Now, a policeman on the other side of the country who a week ago had no idea that George Floyd or Derek Chauvin or the other officers existed?
That's the equivalent of blaming any European for the Holocaust or any Muslim for terrorist attacks or any eastern European for car thefts or any other stereotype you can think of. I mean isn't this what the whole thing is about? Abolishing stereotypes? I'm all up for that, but trying to abolish something by actively using it seems really counter-productive to say the least.
As I previously said, I've had encounters with horrid police officers, regardless of my polite manners. But I'm also aware policemen are people with the exact same problem like any of us. I see something deeply hypocritical in the whole situation(and the many similar situations across the world over the years). Truth be told I only know one police officer personally. And the truth is he is one of the kindest people I have ever met, despite being utterly strict in his work. Now given the opportunity to choose between rocks flying his way and people calling him a dirty pig or playing with his 2 year old granddaughter in the evenings, which one do you think he'd rather pick?
I agree with you, I think there is a failing on two parts: firstly, police are ill equipped (training wise) to handle this and it was a systematic failure to deploy them like this. Secondarily, police (I would guess their union) have continually pushed to expand their ability to use force, giving the impression that they are well equipped to handle this.
On the first, I firmly believe that you should always deploy people who are accustomed to a more difficult or dangerous task. Managing large crowds of potentially violent people is far beyond the typical danger police face (usually peaceful, or one or two dangerous people). On the other hand, this is one of the scenarios the National Guard is trained for. And the level of force is likely lower than what they have trained for. The current response is like handingba Sev1 incident to an intern. They're just as or more likely to cause more damage as they are to help.
On the second point, handing armored vehicles and body armor to a group that isn't well versed in their use and effects on the opposing force is a bad idea. The outcome is inevitably the "five foot drop". When you your electronics don't work and you don't know how to fix them, people tend to give it a hard smack to see if that works. Likewise when your day to day policing doesn't work, deploying your heaviest armaments probably seems like a good idea.
I do still hold the officers accountable to a degree. The degree of force is incredibly one sided. However, more than them, I blame the system that put them in a situation they are so unequipped to handle.
> On the second point, handing armored vehicles and body armor to a group that isn't well versed in their use and effects on the opposing force is a bad idea.
This may be a topic of another discussion but I wouldn't call it a bad idea in a country where everyone and their dog has firearms, just saying...
Body armor, perhaps. I still think it creates a moral hazard; if you were in a situation where someone might shoot you, how much does the idea that your vital organs are protected influence your decision to keep yelling commands versus a decision to go back to your car, write down the license plate, and pick them up at home when you're prepared for the situation?
On the topic of armored vehicles, I vehemently disagree with distributing them to police forces. If there is a significant threat of a firefight, we have an existing domestic force that is trained to handle combat conditions. They are the National Guard. If things escalate to that point, the proper response is to call in the National Guard. They are both trained to handle that situation, and they have far more equipment than you could ever hope for. The National Guard has actual tanks, if it comes to that.
I will grant you, there is a very narrow middle ground of things that SWAT is equipped to handle but the National Guard would take too long to deploy. However I would contend that the military attitude SWAT-style tactics cause costs more in human lives than the small subsection of things SWAT needs to handle before the National Guard arrives.
The police should be a domestic force, charged with maintaining law and order among largely non-violent and lawful citizenry. The National Guard should be a force charged with handling violent and unlawful situations.
Traffic stops are well within the police jurisdiction. Standouts can be handled by police, so long as they don't plan on going in to the building. Taking a building full of hostile combatants with at-risk civilians should be handled by the National Guard. If the police feel at risk enough that they need more than a handgun, they should call the National Guard.
The police are not an invading army performing an occupation of hostile lands. They are public servants enforcing democratically chosen laws on a largely willing populace, of which they are part. Anything outside that scope should be handled by another branch that has been chosen and trained for that purpose.
I get a lot what you're saying regarding the police. I think there's a lot that needs to change, and the mental health of our police needs to be included. Not only are they probably working insane hours, in lots of stress, but it's quite evident lots of them have become completely desensitized from violence. You don't come out of the womb being okay with hitting people that are not a threat.
That said: it's increasingly evident that they're very poorly trained. You see the same strongman tactics in every city. They gang up on a single person, sometimes 4 or 5 of them, all hitting, all kicking, and continue to do this once you're on the ground. If you've ever watched Live PD, you see a ton of this same behavior, all the time, all across the country.
At the same time, there are some really bad cops out there (and the cynic in me tells me they're more common than we're lead on to believe), and also lots that just don't have the mental fortitude to do the work, but are still doing it anyway. Those people need to be weeded out, and we need to better equip them with tools that are not weapons.
While I do want to sympathize with the police officers, at the same time each and every one of them is complicit in what has happened - there is not enough accountability in the police force, not enough emphasis on de-escalating, on respect of people they suspect of wrongdoing - especially if they're PoC.
Why was Floyd pinned to the ground until he suffocated when all he supposedly did was use a fake $20 bill? (supposedly because innocent until proven guilty). Why did none of the other officers present step in? All of them are guilty IMO.
As a police officer, you need to keep your colleagues in check. The problem right now is that there's vast groups of policemen who have no qualms with using excessive violence, especially against PoC, and they protect each other. I suspect that goes up the chain of command all the way up. For one, the US President himself hasn't condemned the actions of the police, not in the Floyd case, not in any other case of police violence. And that makes them complicit.
Which means everyone is missing the point. It doesn't matter if you personally participated in the riots, theft, and destruction: you are in the crowd of people which is a collective and as such, is treated as a collective. There is no other way around it. It's easy to think about it as an ordinary situation, but this is much like war. Only a handful of the population is actively engaged in a war but the damage is reflected upon everyone.
Maybe the smartest move is for the legitimate protestors to go somewhere else, do something else, so that we can isolate those who are taking advantage of the chaos to riot and loot. The protestors are basically just cover for the rioters/looters at this point. To play devil's advocate, they play cover for each other. Protestors retain legitimacy by claiming the rioters/looters are some other people. Rioters/looters can do their work because of all the people and chaos. Protestors have the leverage of continuing violence and destruction unless their demands are met while looters get their free Jordans and Gucci.
Please put the media clips into the repo. The original links will frequently disappear from the censorship platforms. Don’t just link, mirror the videos.
GIT (and github) is a terrible tool for general purpose collaboration of non-technical people.
Something like shared google doc would fit better.
Perhaps google docs, or other collaborative tools are actually able to scale to 30+ users? What is the largest google doc collaboration that you have seen work out?
Maybe they should do that, but make sure to exclude the ones that are insured. Because that's not a net loss.
Also be sure to include the ones that police are responsible for like this car that the Riverside Sherrif busted out for no reason: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_XERvsXvSU
This is awesome. However it’s still pretty vague. Can there be any meaningful action from this ?
Is there a way for a civilian to get access to the officer’s body camera recording and identify which cops are the trigger happy ones.
Basically a more targeted list that says “These officers violated the first amendment constitutional rights of citizens to peacefully assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances, this is the proof, please file charges”.
We are protesting because the police are unaccountable for their actions. How do we move to a place where we can hold them accountable and there is a quick as fair process for justice to be served.
Here's a thread by T. Greg Doucette, a public defender and 1st amendment litigator who is white and conservative-leaning but who also attended an HBCU.
While we're on the topic, here is another useful program that removes metadata from images on github, of anyone can take the time to look over the source code and verify it does what it says that would be super useful:
The one officer who was immediately involved has been charged; the other three have not. However this case is more of the straw that broke the camel's back. It's freshest in our minds and is the face of the protests, but as a whole the protests represent decades of tensions boiling over.
Because charging the individuals does not mean things will change. It won't mean they get a conviction, and it doesn't mean the police force will reorganize, demilitarize, retrain to use less force, or become not racist.
And the other side hasn't de-escalated either, with the president deploying the military. Earlier you could at least hold the police using excessive force accountable - assuming they didn't hide their badge number, which some did. Now, there's faceless, badgeless (not even an indication what branch of the military they're from) soldiers stepping in.
The protesters demand change, not a few individuals being held accountable. For every Floyd that died, there's hundreds if not thousands more of unjust incidents.
If you're going to document violence, do it on both sides and try to document without any bias. Don't let your agenda cloud your judgement about what narrative to tell.
The second clip I've looked at claims "The Police try to break up the peaceful protest by resorting to hitting individuals with batons.".
What ACTUALLY happens is that they cut out all context of what led up to the situation, and cut in to a point where anybody with half a brain could see that the cops had been giving lawful orders for rioters to disperse, for what was probably a long time, they're on a loudspeaker giving them lawful orders to disperse, warning them that if they don't disperse force will be used against them, they decide to ignore lawful orders, and force is used against them to make them disperse.
The way the headline makes it sound, they were just nice peaceful protesters, not causing any problems, and police just rolled in and started beating them.
Protest is legal, and ignoring a "lawful police order" is also legal. The police can't just tell people what to do. Neither of those things warrant being assaulted by a police officer. Your own description of what happened is that the police used force to disperse peaceful protestors, which is obviously unacceptable.
> Protest is legal, and ignoring a "lawful police order" is also legal. The police can't just tell people what to do.
This is a pretty thin hair to split. The police can’t ‘tell you what to do’, but the law can and part of the job of the police is to communicate and enforce the law.
Anyone going to a protest is definitely advised to understand their rights at the local, state and federal level so you can differentiate between the two.
What world do you live in? I could just go on a murder spree and when police come to arrest me I can just tell them "you can't tell me what to do", and they'll say "shucks, he's right, guess we'll let him on his way".
By the way, you're being doublespeaky when you say "protest is legal". It sure is. But the vast majority of these altercations come from after a group has been declared a riot, a public safety hazard, and ordered to disperse. They're no longer peaceful protesters when the cops have to use force to shut it down.
> But the vast majority of these altercations come from after a group has been declared a riot
This is typically after police have antagonized the situation and created it through tactics like kettling and surrounding protesters and then throwing grenades of tear gas and misusing rubber bullets in potentially lethal ways on nonviolent crowds.
"declared a riot" is political speak for when the police don't like a protest and begin attacking.
Yes, that’s 100% correct. There is an overabundance of documented evidence that police all around America are declaring completely peaceful protests riots and responding with force.
You can find the videos yourself of this happening over many many cities. I'm not going to do that work for someone clearly not trying to understand in good faith.
You say this like it's a conspiracy when there are clear maligned motives for cops to approach these things in this manner, as well as a history of it.
> In your mind, cops really just see a peaceful protest and just decide to start fucking with them?
Sometimes, but not often.
More often, when there is a gross “overreaction”, it's a calculated attempt to suppress the message of the protestors, coordinated by leadership and instigated by various means including feeding false intelligence to the cops on the line that distorts their interpretation of facts.
But in the case of race-related issues it's often much worse than that, and this is apparently the case now. The infiltration of American law enforcement agencies by white supremacists is long-documented, there is, at the moment, an active white supremacist effort to trigger a race war, and the President of the United States is actively using language invoking historical racist government violence, and directly initiating violence against peaceful protestors. This isn't impulsive police violence, or merely violence as instrumental to winning a political debate, this is a (mostly loosely) coordinated campaign of racist violence where the violence and the harms it inflicts is, itself, a goal, and not just a callously accepted cost of some other end.
Can you explain what the cops [1] were doing to this car and what is their rationale for destroying someone else's property? Was the car resisting arrest?
The police have limited powers to uphold the law, including things like arresting murderers. They don't have the power to arbitrarily order people to do whatever they want. If an officer asks you to do something when you're not committing a crime or endangering anyone you are allowed to say no.
For all Americans talk about having rights and freedom you do seem incredibly quick to give them up in the face of authority.
I fully expect police officers in the United States to be able to give lawful orders to disperse rioters and prevent our cities from looting and destruction.
If you don't want to be told what to do, don't riot, loot, and destroy.
If you're trying to say that our citizens can just burn our cities down, and there's nothing that can be legally done about it, I really don't understand you.
In all the clips you see, they're no longer peaceful protesters. All of the clips cut out all of the context. That's the piece you're missing. Peaceful protests happen every day and the police don't order them to disperse. Police only order them to disperse when they've become a public safety hazard.
As someone who has taken part in DC protests, we were gassed, pepper sprayed, stun grenaded, and shot with pellets in order for the president to take a photo at a church. It is incredibly naïve and downright incorrect to suggest that the police are _only_ intervening during "public safety hazards".
Well, to be clear: they can. Courts have given police very wide latitude on what they're allowed to compel from the public in the execution of their duties. This is sort of the problem.
That said, your second point is really the meat here. Faced with civilians refusing their orders, it is not appropriate for the police to resort to any and all means to compel obediance. No one thinks it is. Especially conservatives, under normal circumstances (who, it seems, are a little confused right now).
I mean... most of the same people who two weeks ago were all "You can't tell I'm supposed to stay at home, that's tyranny!" are now all of a sudden all "You can't stay in that park if the president wants to be there! You should be tear gassed![1]"
[1] Excuse me: "pepper balls", which is totally not the same thing because it disperses a fine suspended powder and never enters a gas phase.
It's called abuse of power. Police should be enforcing laws, not their own will. Police 100% cannot tell people to do anything. The issue is the law is not good at defining these things, leading to this exact issue of mass scale police brutality. If you think the police have that much latitude in their power, you're missing the entire point of the protests.
No it is not. The police are there to uphold the law, not dictate what people do.
If someone's protesting they are exercising their rights and the police has no right to intervene. If someone is looting however, sure, then they can step in - with appropriate force, which in most cases does not involve shooting them in the face.
Yes. Upholding the law necessarily involves telling people what to do. They cannot arbitrarily tell people what to do, but that’s not what I was arguing.
Being wrong is fine and being snarky is fine, but both at the same time is generally a bad look.
Others have added comments with links to specific videos, so I won't copy and paste them here, but it's clear that police officers are continuing the age-old tradition of punitive violence.
Please reconsider why you think this behavior is justified.
> It's really interesting the world we live in, some people look at these clips and get enraged at how horrible the police are. I look at the clips and they all make perfect sense.
1. You are never going to agree because your beliefs are fundamentally misaligned. Since you believe police retaliation is warranted when targets are breaking the law, you will simply excuse violence upon protesters when:
>[Protesters] physically refused to obey lawful commands.
You may or may not be aware, but that’s typically what protest via assembly means.
2. You are replying to a different person. If you’re going to be so condescending and rude at least employ due diligence in identifying who you’re replying to. Or, preferably, just stop being so rude and condescending.
I have no horse in this race, but a YouTube video doesn't seem like an adequate rebuttal to what seemed like fairly reasonable skepticism about the quality and trustworthiness of the evidence supporting claimed abuses.
It's literally footage from 7 News Australia, the biggest TV station in Australia.
Are you suggesting the footage was doctored? Where do you host video, if not YouTube? Honest question. If video from a reputable Australia News crew, hosted on YouTube is not adequate, what do you think would be?
> Honest question. If video from a reputable Australia News crew, hosted on YouTube is not adequate, what do you think would be?
The article in questions is titled:
U.S. police have attacked journalists more than 120 times since May 28
The person to which you replied was questioning the trustworthiness of the data upon which that claim is based. Do you consider footage of one event conclusive evidence for 120 events?
Would your thinking style change if we switched up some of the variables, say something like:
Young black males have attacked elderly women more than 120 times since May 28
Would one video be sufficient evidence to satisfy your mind in this scenario as well?
If there's literally hundreds of videos out there (which is probably an exaggeration for the time period given, but regardless there are plenty), there's no need to publish lies or Twitter hearsay. Sticking to publishing solid evidence makes criticisms like the GP's totally irrelevant. I'm on the side of the protests, but really to change minds you need to be concise and accurate in reporting. Quality > Quantity if quantity means you're not filtering garbage.
Evidence that supports your side gets a free pass?
Being skeptical of claims from any side seems like what we should be striving for. There's no need to treat every story as True/False binary - considering the quality of the data we're working with, the most proper status for most claims should probably be [unknown].
> It's really interesting the world we live in, some people look at these clips and get enraged at how horrible the police are. I look at the clips and they all make perfect sense.
> For example, the first clip I looked at claims "Couple of police officers are seen beating and manhandling an unarmed man. The officers are throwing punches while he was on the ground and pinned.".
> What ACTUALLY happened was that a protester was physically assaulting somebody else, and the police rushed in to separate them and secure the situation. They attempted to arrest the assaulter, who then resisted arrest and started punching an officer in the face, and was therefore punched back as a result.
So you think it's acceptable that multiple armored people hold someone to the ground and punch him, because he punched first? Is that how you educate your children? "If somebody punches you get your friends together and beat the lone person up?"
> The clips are primarily given without any context of what led up to the event, which is hugely important, and then "conveniently" forget to mention all of the relevant information, such as the fact that the person getting hurt was resisting arrest and punching officers in the face.
Again we completely disagree, context does not matter. The police must be held to higher standards than your schoolyard bullies. Did George Floyd deserve to be killed because he was resisting?
> The fact that you have to "conveniently" leave out facts, leave out context of what led up to the events, and give political spin to what you're trying to show makes me immediately dismiss everything you're trying to say.
> The second clip I've looked at claims "The Police try to break up the peaceful protest by resorting to hitting individuals with batons.".
> What ACTUALLY happens is that they cut out all context of what led up to the situation, and cut in to a point where anybody with half a brain could see that the cops had been giving lawful orders for rioters to disperse, for what was probably a long time, they're on a loudspeaker giving them lawful orders to disperse, warning them that if they don't disperse force will be used against them, they decide to ignore lawful orders, and force is used against them to make them disperse.
How do you know that it was a lawful order? So what are your thoughts on constitutional rights?
Who cut out the context? Who is this 'they'? Is there a conspiracy to cut out the video context when there are a large number of individual people recording things as they occur from multiple angles?
It seems like you're the one conveniently leaving out facts while behaving disingenuous as all get out. 'Context' in this case doesn't exist for arguments such as yours, because the goal posts will always be conveniently moved backwards until some shred of evidence is found to justify the police behavior.
No conspiracy, just mobs being terrible and resharing the most salacious clips without regard for the truth, which is what mobs do, like the mob that lynched the truck driver who got trapped on an Interstate that was overrun by protestors. He was rescued by sane people among the mob, but not before he was beaten to a pulp and robbed of all his personal effects.
This is the most disingenuous take I've seen on here yet. Why don't you post the video of the incident instead [1]? This is someone that nearly ran over a large crowd of people, no shit the crowd is going to be angry after seeing what looked like someone trying to murder them. It seems you're the one trying to twist the truth here.
You realize police have cams on their uniforms and could submit video tape that refutes every claim, why haven't they? Probably because if they released all the feeds the video would be WAY more damning.
Clip for context. The guy on the ground hits an officer in the helmet, once, at 0:30. If you think their response was measured and appropriate and followed ROE/EOF, then I feel sorry for the worldview you hold.
My point is just that the guy is also an idiot for doing what he did and that weakens the argument against the police and cutting those scenes out of the videos is disingenious.
OK, but can we acknowledge that the fact we need to frame police as "lions" as disturbing? Not to be too provocative here, but the protest are happening because this analogy fits a little too well.
It’s not normal, I am in fact generally against any form of authoritarianism, I think cops should be less powerful. Maybe my analogy makes it seem otherwise, I was just trying to point out that the context is pretty relevant here. As in, someone getting killed by a lion for no reason and someone getting killed by a lion after provoking it are very different stories.
Uh... citation? I mean, I'll grant that in principle sites like this are a poor way to curate evidence. But there are many accounts over the past few days of police violence that clearly doesn't have the kind of exculpatory context you've applied to the two videos you watched. Are you discounting all of it? Why?
There's one from NYC that says: "A police officer forcefully pulls off a protestors face mask and pepper sprays him. The protestor had his hands up in surrender when this happened."
If you look at the video though the guy was pushing towards the officer against the officer's hand. What do you expect to happen when you decide to aggress on an officer instead of back away?
I watched that video. You have clearly mastered the application of Newton's third law, by pointing out that when someone pushes you away with their hand, you are also pushing against their hand. We only disagree about whether it's correct to pepper spray someone in the face when this happens.
I agree. We clearly have a dramatic difference of opinion about when it is a good time to pepper spray someone. I suppose the police officer in the video shares your opinion, and the authors of the document share mine.
The cops seem to have a low threshold for using it.
There was a video where a bunch of riot police were riding on the outside of an SUV. One fell off of it to the ground, got back up turned around and pepper sprayed behind him, even though there was no one behind him. There was no one moving towards him or even near him.
Truly an insane moment that really underscores the level of fear these cops are acting under. If they are that unstable, they should not be out in the field currently.
I have said this elsewhere on HN, but I think these protests would be better for everyone if police simply did not show up. I think the video we are referencing is a great example why.
The national guard is backing up the police. The police presence there was long before they came in. So yes, like Minneapolis. If the initial police response was different we could see a vastly different landscape of protests currently, but that set the tone and virtually no departments have been effective or even been trying to deescalate it seems.
A complementary repo which would be interesting to make to give a more complete view of the situation is one listing the destructions, lootings and physical agression made by non-police forces.
