Serious Police Brutality in the U.S.

Do you believe the U.S. has a problem with police brutality?

  • Yes, especially towards black men

    Votes: 187 53.3%
  • Yes, but not specifically biased against black men

    Votes: 101 28.8%
  • No

    Votes: 63 17.9%

  • Total voters
    351

atomicllamas

but then what's left of me?
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Police and government are two different entities, don't try to make it sound like there's some kind of government conspiracy to murder specific ethnic minorities. The vast majority of cases are individual cops making bad decisions. Also, in this case I don't support cops that shoot innocent people OR people who get pissed off at the cops and throw violent temper tantrums that destroy the property of innocent bystanders. There's no dichotomy here, I don't have to be in one camp or the other - in this hypothetical situation, both parties are in the wrong. Responding to prejudice in this way only damages the cause.
Except the police and government are two heavily intertwined entities, and when the attorney generals decide not to prosecute a cop that kills an innocent (black) person it moves on from a "bad cop" problem to a systemic one. This is the same system where black people get sentenced to years in jail for non violent drug offenses, while young white men get 3 months for rape. Where 3 white men raping a mentally ill black man with a coat hanger, calling him watermelon, and forcing him to sing KKK anthems is not a hate crime and they get 0 jail time. But 4 black people burning a mentally ill white guy with cigarettes for voting trump is a hate crime and will get jail time (as they should).

If you're under the impression that issues in the justice system are just a couple "bad cops", or "bad AGs", or "bad judges" and not symptomatic of a systemic problem, you may be woefully out of touch.
 

Myzozoa

to find better ways to say what nobody says
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cause i like this thread better than the other one, it is more on topic, and because this is also my 2k.


start with this whole article:


https://theintercept.com/2017/01/31...-supremacist-infiltration-of-law-enforcement/

"
After a series of investigations uncovered substantial numbers of extremists in the military, the Department of Defense moved to impose stricter screenings, including monitoring recruits’ tattoos for white supremacist symbols and discharging those found to espouse racist views.

“The military has completely reformed its process on this front,” said the SPLC’s Beirich, who lobbied the DOD to adopt those reforms. “I don’t know why it wouldn’t be the same for police officers; we can’t have people with guns having crazy ideas or ideas that threaten certain populations.”

"ACORDING TO THE Counterterrorism Policy Guide, the FBI has the option to mark a watchlisted police officer as a “silent hit,” thus preventing queries to the National Crime Information Center, a clearinghouse for crime data accessible to law enforcement agencies nationwide, from returning a record that identifies the officer as having been flagged as a known or suspected terrorist. The document states that a “specific, narrowly defined, and legitimate operational justification” must be given in order to mark a Known or Suspected Terrorist (KST) entry as a silent hit. The suspect’s membership or affiliation with a law enforcement or military agency with access to the NCIC database is one of the specific justifications listed, implying that extremist infiltration is enough of a concern that the FBI has built-in protocols to prevent domestic terrorism investigations from being obstructed by members of law enforcement."

"
A disproportionate number of Muslims have been included on the watchlist, and because the database is accessible to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies nationwide, the ACLU said, they are exposed to “unwarranted scrutiny or investigation by police.” That level of scrutiny has hardly been applied to white supremacists, however, even though the country’s first anti-terrorism laws, in the 1870s, were aimed at protecting black citizens from groups like the KKK, and despite the ongoing threat posed by these extremists.

“This is a fundamental problem in this country: We simply do not take this flexible, and forgiving, and exceptionally understanding approach for combating any other form of terrorism,” said Jones. “Anybody who’s on social media advocating support for ISIS can be criminally charged with very little effort.”

“For some reason, we have stepped away from the threat of domestic terrorism and right-wing extremism,” Jones continued. “The only way we can reconcile this kind of behavior is if we accept the possibility that the ideology that permeates white nationalists and white supremacists is something that many in our federal and law enforcement communities understand and may be in sympathy with.”

That sympathy might just be reflected by the election of a president who was endorsed and celebrated by the KKK, and who has been reluctant to disassociate himself from individuals espousing white supremacist views.

“This election, for white supremacists, was a signal that ‘We’re on the right track,’” said Simi. “I have never seen anything like it among white supremacists, where they express this feeling of triumph and jubilee. They are just elated about the idea that they feel like they have somebody in the White House who gets it.”
Which leads us to:



https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...-alt-right-rally-militia-member-police-arrest


"Mat dos Santos, legal director at ACLU of Oregon, criticised the incident, saying that cooperation with one side of a volatile protest demonstrated “the different ways that law enforcement engages with people who look and act like them, and people and communities who don’t look and act like them”.

"

and finally lol huffpo critiquing non-violence of all sources:


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...ce-in-the-wake-of_us_593988dce4b014ae8c69de76

"Don’t be fooled into believing the Alt-Right is only taking up violence because someone punched Spencer. The alt-right has long been preparing for war, they are holding training courses and teaching each other how to make weapons to bring to rallies.

They are doing so, not only to protect themselves from Antifa but also attack them, all under the guise of “free speech rights.” They understand that people mobilizing to deplatform them is a threat to any attempt that they have to organize, and thus are doing everything they can to carve out space for themselves."

"
In Spencer’s own words he was terrified after being assaulted, he planned to attend the Women’s March the weekend after the inauguration and didn’t show up out of fear for his safety. Spencer was already a public figure who was punched while being interviewed by an international television station, but the message was sent to his followers. That message is that they are not safe to stand in the streets and spread their message of genocide. Not punching him would have shown him he is safe to stand on the street espousing his abhorrent views, without consequence.

Professor George Ciccariello-Maher, in an interview with Abolition Journal, had this to say about the punching of Spencer:

I think what is being missed is the fact that this is a praxis, that this is not simply a performance—it’s not an expression of frustration. It’s an actual political practice that is constructive and creative. The effects that punching Nazis creates include, first, as Richard Spencer through his own absurd inability to think strategically has admitted, it has made his life a living hell already. He admitted that it’s making it very difficult for them to organize. He’s admitted, in other words, everything that many of us have said about how Nazis need to be treated and about this famous apocryphal quote from Hitler that says, ‘If someone had recognized early on and crushed our movement with the utmost brutality of violence, then we would never have been able to grow.’”"

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/...t-survivor-s-testimony-condemning-ICE-arrests





http://thefreethoughtproject.com/st...ped-and-molested-by-cops/#vcFABErkuU6erU7h.01


and this bundle of joy:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/09/theresa-may-gamble
 
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Myzozoa

to find better ways to say what nobody says
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but also a foot note: fuck george ciccirialo-maher, quoted above.

"U.S. academics who fancy themselves involved in revolutionary political struggles are trivializing the risks faced by actual political dissidents around the world, including the hundreds of environmental activists who have been murdered globally for their efforts to protect indigenous land."

"Of course, it’s true that there are still some subversive ideas on university campuses, and some true existing threats to academic and student freedom. Many of them have to do with Israel or labor organizing. In 2014, Steven Salaita was fired from a tenured position at the University of Illinois for tweets he had made about Israel. (After a protracted lawsuit, Salaita eventually reached a settlement with the university.) Fordham University tried to ban a Students for Justice in Palestine group, and the University of California Board of Regents attempted to introduce a speech code that would have punished much criticism of Israel as “hate speech.” The test of whether your ideas are actually dangerous is whether you are rewarded or punished for expressing them."


Basically the point is that while anti-fa is obviously some sort of movement or practice, it is not a praxis because it doesn't threaten capitalism.

It's a dilemma because if you're white you always get paid out, whether you work for or against white supremacy in the moment. White people will always have privilege to fall back on, literally some type of legal standing. So the question for anti-fa is do you actually work with poc organizations, and what is the nature of that relationship? How are you accountable? Because it's a dangerous ego trap of white bourgeois savior=isms. tell the peasants to fight in the streets does not necessarily threaten the police or corporations, while it escalates the stakes of protests through cycles of violence.

some thoughts.
 

atomicllamas

but then what's left of me?
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'I thought I was gonna die and I thought if he's, if he has the, the guts and the audacity to smoke marijuana in front of the five year old girl and risk her lungs and risk her life by giving her secondhand smoke and the front seat passenger doing the same thing then what, what care does he give about me,' says man with the audacity to fire 7 shots into a car with said 5 year old girl. His justification for the shooting would almost be funny if it weren't for the fact he's a literal state condoned murderer.
 

dwarfstar

mindless philosopher
Just when we think the half-assed attempts to hide the racial motivations of these murders can't get any more obvious, they gotta add insult to injury. It's not enough to execute an innocent man for the crime of driving while Black, but Yañez has to insult the intelligence of Philando's partner and child and everybody else who bore witness to his sin with this fucking bullshit story? This whole damn thing is a fucking joke, and the punchline is a little kid who's gotta grow up without a father and a pig free to kill again. ACAB
 

Oglemi

Borf
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Really, the only cops that /need/ guns are SWAT cops. Literally everything else can be handled with tazers and good negotiating tactics, and it's remarkable that we still think they most effective way for cops to handle things is by yelling with their handgun drawn. In reality, that should be the very last thing they touch. Usually, if a situation occurs in which a cop /needs/ a gun, it's either too late anyway (and the tazer will resolve the issue, the cop's already been shot/wounded, or the suspect has escaped/run off) or something is in progress, ie. a hostage situation, which means more cops are going to be on hand to get a handle on the situation in which guns may be needed (ie. SWAT).

It's like, the elephant in the room x20, and politicians won't touch the subject because if they appear light on crime they auto-lose the election. I remember reading something during the November election that "cleaning up crime" was still in the top 5 issues people were voting on, and it's insane how many of those were from rural areas where that "crime" doesn't even happen, they just think Chicago et al. are just cesspools of crime and need to be cleaned up. I know people back home that think you would literally get shot for being white in Detroit or Chicago. It's such a severe isolationist/ignorance is bliss mindset in a time when we're more globally connected than ever before, and politicians thrive off of it. Times like this I wish I was still in education so that I could show kids in these rural areas what it's actually like but meh, that's a whole other level of fucked anyway.
 

Soul Fly

IMMA TEACH YOU WHAT SPLASHIN' MEANS
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There is a very legitimate case that the populist tough on crime angle has made a lot of police in the US into a literal paramilitary with very little accountability and glorifying the police has engendered a Sicilian mafia-like attitude towards whistleblowers/witnesses, but I think your assumption is a little too generous in a country where the second amendment is a thing. The very nature of "enforcement" dictates you have force at par with the population you need to deal with, and that makes having guns a bare minimum, even if just to start a "negotiation" on equal terms. The proportion of actually violent criminals as you seem to imply as a factor doesn't matter as much but your ability to police them does, standard fare under the one percent doctrine, as usually lives are at stake in such scenario.

Unless you want every case which escalates to involving a gun be dealt with by the SWAT which.. isn't a good idea tbh the way SWAT responses is structured, again for a good reason, but even in their present level of involvement cause collateral damage..

Not that your problem isn't real, it very much is. What might be necessary for cops patrolling Baltimore to hold down violent crews is excessive for the rest of the community. But its unlikely it can objectively legislated away in such a fashion completely, although its not a bad idea to start taking away literal fucking armoured tanks from the police. Discretion oh how and when violence is acceptable must involve larger structural/ethical questions.
 

Soul Fly

IMMA TEACH YOU WHAT SPLASHIN' MEANS
is a Contributor Alumnus
also double posting but the police dashcam video from the castile shooting was just released yesterday. Since the trial was over and all. Judge it for yourself. Go through the (now public) transcripts if you want to and just decide for yourself if you want to live in a society where this is acceptable.
 

thesecondbest

Just Kidding I'm First
also double posting but the police dashcam video from the castile shooting was just released yesterday. Since the trial was over and all. Judge it for yourself. Go through the (now public) transcripts if you want to and just decide for yourself if you want to live in a society where this is acceptable.
> officer says don't pull it out
> he reaches anyway without saying anything
Now obviously, there are other officers right there so I don't know why this one thought shooting was necessary. But if a police officer says don't pull out a gun, don't make it look like you are! Say "OK officer, I'm just getting my insurance. My gun is ___ (wherever it is)." Then they won't shoot you.
I'm not justifying what this cop did, but it is also partially Philando's fault. Other shootings like Mike Brown where he charged at the cop (look at what witnesses said in the trial) are completely justified, and others like Walter Scott where he was just running away are completely unjustified. This one is somewhere in the middle. Both the cop and Philando are at fault.
 

GatoDelFuego

The Antimonymph of the Internet
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> officer says don't pull it out
> he reaches anyway without saying anything
Now obviously, there are other officers right there so I don't know why this one thought shooting was necessary. But if a police officer says don't pull out a gun, don't make it look like you are! Say "OK officer, I'm just getting my insurance. My gun is ___ (wherever it is)." Then they won't shoot you.
I'm not justifying what this cop did, but it is also partially Philando's fault. Other shootings like Mike Brown where he charged at the cop (look at what witnesses said in the trial) are completely justified, and others like Walter Scott where he was just running away are completely unjustified. This one is somewhere in the middle. Both the cop and Philando are at fault.
Castile: Sir, I have to tell you I do have a ...
Yanez: OK.
Castile: ... firearm on me.
Yanez: OK
Castile: I (inaudible)
Yanez: Don't reach for it then.
Castile: I'm, I, I was reaching for ...
Yanez: Don't pull it out.
Castile: I'm not pulling it out.
Reynolds: He's not.
Yanez: Don't pull it out.
Yanez, whose hand had been near his gun, pulls out his weapon and fires seven rapid shots into the car, striking Castile five times.
Did you uh...watch the video?
 

termi

bike is short for bichael
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> officer says don't pull it out
> he reaches anyway without saying anything
Now obviously, there are other officers right there so I don't know why this one thought shooting was necessary. But if a police officer says don't pull out a gun, don't make it look like you are! Say "OK officer, I'm just getting my insurance. My gun is ___ (wherever it is)." Then they won't shoot you.
I'm not justifying what this cop did, but it is also partially Philando's fault. Other shootings like Mike Brown where he charged at the cop (look at what witnesses said in the trial) are completely justified, and others like Walter Scott where he was just running away are completely unjustified. This one is somewhere in the middle. Both the cop and Philando are at fault.
The repulsive cop acted like a completely incompetent moron, he did not in any way follow proper procedure. Let me just list off how completely at fault the cop is and how even if Castille could have handled the situation better (which I doubt), the cop is to blame here, not the guy who lost his life. So:

OK so for one, the cop sticks his gun into the vehicle, turning a simple traffic check into a dangerous situation out of fucking nowhere. There was absolutely no reason at all to assume Castille was dangerous, let alone willing to kill a police officer over nothing (while his daughter was sitting in the back). Castille, feeling threatened and trying to take the tension away from the situation, discloses that he has a firearm. Now the cop could either take it for granted and have Castille continue doing what he already was doing (grabbing his wallet for identification), or, if the cop felt threatened, he could have told Castille to stop moving so that the cop could make sure that the firearm wasn't going to be an issue. Since the cop did not tell Castille that, the logical assumption would be that Castille is free to grab his ID as he was instructed to do.

Basically, it's the cop's responsibility to handle the situation properly and he should keep control over the situation. The cop did not take control over the situation, and what ensued was chaos. It wasn't clear for Castille what he should be doing at that point, and regardless of whether he could have acted better given the situation, the bumbling idiot who passes for a cop is entirely at fault for even letting things escalate like this.
 
My parents always told me from a young age (definitely over 15 years ago by now) that you should tell the police officer where your ID, wallet, whatever may be and if need be, let him/her get it instead while you have your hands up. If they see you reach for your waist or glove compartment, it's fair game for them to shoot. That was one of the first things they were told when learning how to drive.

Oh, and they lived in Canada, not the US.
 

vonFiedler

I Like Chopin
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My parents always told me from a young age (definitely over 15 years ago by now) that you should tell the police officer where your ID, wallet, whatever may be and if need be, let him/her get it instead while you have your hands up. If they see you reach for your waist or glove compartment, it's fair game for them to shoot. That was one of the first things they were told when learning how to drive.

Oh, and they lived in Canada, not the US.
I trained cops to do traffic stops. This is nonsense.
 
I trained cops to do traffic stops. This is nonsense.
So you're saying I shouldn't take extra precaution? And may I ask how long ago were you training them? Obviously it's been decades since my parents learned how to drive, so things are likely to have changed since then.
 

vonFiedler

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So you're saying I shouldn't take extra precaution?
I'm saying that everything about what you just said is ridiculous. Have you ever even been pulled over? No one pulls out your registration themselves. Don't reach around like an asshole but if they tell you to grab something, you just grab it. Who has their hands up during a traffic stop? Do you realize what a colossal asshole you'd look like? Like wtf. "Fair game to shoot"? People act this way comically in movies. In real life it doesn't help (as seen in this incident). You're gonna insult the cop at best and look guilty of something at worst.
 
I'm saying that everything about what you just said is ridiculous. Have you ever even been pulled over? No one pulls out your registration themselves. Don't reach around like an asshole but if they tell you to grab something, you just grab it. Who has their hands up during a traffic stop? Do you realize what a colossal asshole you'd look like? Like wtf. "Fair game to shoot"? People act this way comically in movies. In real life it doesn't help (as seen in this incident). You're gonna insult the cop at best and look guilty of something at worst.
Lol, that's what I'm told, and sure you can think it's ridiculous and all, but if my parents got by all these years without having ended up like Philando Castile, then hey, whatever. Probably helps they're not black, but that's beside the point.
 

TheValkyries

proudly reppin' 2 superbowl wins since DEFLATEGATE
Probably helps they're not black, but that's beside the point.
No, that literally is exactly the point there, breh.

And to be clear you're saying "if you're near a cop don't move or else they might shoot you!" which is just about the most mind-numbingly ludicrous thing ever. "Oh well see there's your problem, you MOVED when he told you to, you shouldn't do that, but also you should immediately acquiesce to every request a cop makes as well because if you don't comply then he might shoot you then too." And for the matter of not moving and being as non threatening as possible I distinctly remember that there was a mentally ill black man on the ground with a toy truck in Florida that wasn't moving who was also repeatedly shot by police.

What point do we have to reach before we stop making excuses for cops?
 

Soul Fly

IMMA TEACH YOU WHAT SPLASHIN' MEANS
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^Hmm, that's interesting. Equating racism as being endemic to capitalism is something I do not understand. Its quite reasonable that racism stems from asymmetry of power however power and hierarchies isn't exclusive to capitalism. Racism or exclusionism of some way, shape, or form is and has been universal to all forms of society... throughout history.

I have no doubt that capitalism is something that gives greater magnitude to racism and allows it to perpetuate in its various subliminal manifestations, but that seems more like a constant corruption of the human condition rather than something you can tie down to economic determinism. The scope of what racism is rather biblical in its proportions in a manner of saying.

e: unless ofc the picture isn't arguing that no capitalism = no racism just the cycle of enabling and abetting... then ok that probably makes more sense (to me at least).
 
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