George Floyd

mccardey said:

See, this is what we don't understand. You guys are lovely and yet the awful keeps on happening.

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We don't understand it either.

AW Admin said:

See also this:

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Flint? That Flint? They've seen more than share of pain, on all sides:
the economy, the pollution, the water. I imagine the Sheriff understands people hurting more than most.
A good man for a bad time.

mccardey said:

See, this is what we don't understand. You guys are lovely and yet the awful keeps on happening.

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I spent several years working with folks overseas, mostly in Africa. I was told many times "We love you, but we hate your government." I wonder if there is a domestic corollary of that: even to our own people we're great as individuals but nasty in the aggregate (government group or not).

MaeZe said:

We don't understand it either.

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Me neither.

There is a pandemic going on. This virus doesn't care if you are black or white, a protester or a police officer, a conservative or a liberal. It spreads whenever you give it the chance. Thousands of people just did. While the country is reopening for business.

-cb

mccardey said:

There used to be Trumpers in these pages, and I wish they were still here, so they could explain the thinking behind what they like about Trump.

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Hmm, what do you think they would say? At other sites I visit, the explanations from Trumpers never cohabit with facts.

As if things couldn't get stranger, some rando in Salt Lake City shouts "All Lives Matter!" before attacking protesters with a hunting bow: https://www.abc4.com/news/top-stori...in-salt-lake-city-being-screened-for-charges/

A short clip that I saw mentioned in reddit. Purports to be from Minneapolis, taken by homeowners standing on their porch, watching police (or national guard; not clear) marching down their street. Orders to “get inside” are ignored (legally, could be ignored — the curfew applies to public spaces, not your own property) and very quickly escalate to “Light ‘em up!” and firing of non-lethal (but still dangerous) rounds at the homeowners.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvYpSubrqrc

If this was police, it’s a further indictment of our militarization of those. This should have been a simple warning to get inside or face arrest (setting aside the legality of that order), but instead jumped to this.

Black Lives Matter: Ways to Help

I don't know what else to say.

And this in New Jersey and South Texas.

So many police departments don't seem to understand (or maybe don't care) that the way they treat their communities determines how their communities respond to them.

Introversion said:

A short clip that I saw mentioned in reddit. Purports to be from Minneapolis, taken by homeowners standing on their porch, watching police (or national guard; not clear) marching down their street. Orders to “get inside” are ignored (legally, could be ignored — the curfew applies to public spaces, not your own property) and very quickly escalate to “Light ‘em up!” and firing of non-lethal (but still dangerous) rounds at the homeowners.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvYpSubrqrc

If this was police, it’s a further indictment of our militarization of those. This should have been a simple warning to get inside or face arrest (setting aside the legality of that order), but instead jumped to this.

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I believe this tweet was the original source.

But see this too:

These guys locked arms to protect an officer in Louisville, KY, after he was separated from his crew. #Riots2020

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I really truly believe that the response and behavior of law enforcement is a key determinant.

AW Admin said:

But see this too:



I really truly believe that the response and behavior of law enforcement is a key determinant.

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Watching the live feed from the local TV station last night, I was struck by how much restraint the individual officers showed. I would have lost my shit and lashed out with folks in my face! I can't say everything was done right, but this could have been so, so much worse and out of control (and deadly) if the police had lost their cool.

Here in Richmond, a man is fighting for his life after being shot. He was in a vehicle near the protesters. There is as yet no description of the shooter. This happened in the Fan District near my alma mater, VCU. Shit's getting real y'all....
https://www.wtvr.com/news/local-news/man-shot-in-downtown-richmond-during-second-night-of-protests

The (in)famous Confederate statues on Monument Avenue were covered with anti-racist graffiti. Looking at them like this is a light bulb moment for me as a Gen-X white Southerner. I saw them as the black community must: as a symbol of oppression like the Berlin Wall. They are on a street lined with mansions and might as well be a wall keeping people of color away from the wealth built by racial and economic injustice.
https://commonwealthtimes.org/2020/...f-george-floyd-reaches-confederate-monuments/

This tweet has some really good daytime shots (CW: profanity and possibly disturbing images), including a close shot of the rope dangling from the Jefferson Davis statue.

Honestly, I'm kind of amazed this hasn't happened much more often. Now that it has, I can't imagine those statues existing any other way.

Put the statues in a museum, and leave the graffiti on.

There are a lot of videos of horrific police brutality from the last few days. Like this cop who kicked a person who had been maced and was sitting on the ground over. #police brutality on Twitter has many, many examples. Hundreds? Thousands? I don't know. They're still coming. Ali Velshi said on MSNBC he and his camera crew were walking toward police, camera and stick mike visible, and called out that they were media. Police yelled, "We don't care," and tear gassed and shot them with rubber bullets. I'm glad not all cops are violent thugs, but a lot of them are, and a lot of their fellow officers don't do one thing even when they their colleagues violently assault unarmed (as opposed to heavily armed white) protesters.

I tried for a long time to believe most cops are good (when I worked ER, I had a great relationship with law enforcement. I respected the hell out of the cops we interacted with). But I've seen too many Black men, women, and children brutalized and murdered to truly believe that anymore. Because over and over, the bad cop does a bad thing, makes up some bullshit story that other officers corroborate, and then a video is released that shows all of them were lying. I've seen that literally dozens of times. So, no, I think there are a few good apples.

Introversion said:

Hmm, what do you think they would say? At other sites I visit, the explanations from Trumpers never cohabit with facts.

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I had a brief conversation with a pro-Trump, Christian conservative where they sort of had to admit why they voted for Trump. Basically, money over faith. They decided in a Trump world, they personally (being white, upper middle class with stable health insurance) would make more money, and that apparently makes it fine to vote for someone I honestly believe Jesus Christ would have spit on.

mccardey said:

See, this is what we don't understand. You guys are lovely and yet the awful keeps on happening.

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A minority of people can spoil it for everyone else. It's not something I really understand, but I think it's related to fear.

I think a fundamental truth of American culture that many don't see about ourselves is we are not the "land of the brave." We're a deeply fearful culture, and it's maybe what's behind much of this pathology. White Americans, even those who have no personal animus towards African Americans, generally accept this kind of shit from police because we are afraid of the consequences of stripping police of some of their power and imposing more oversight on their activities at every level. The counter-argument is that police will be paralyzed and not able to do their jobs.

And of course, White people are rarely the victims, and it's easy to rationalize that most of the time the victims of violence are "not boy scouts" anyway.

I think most White Americans are also afraid of real prison and criminal justice reform. Doing so might let more "bad guys" get away. One of the many things most Americans (especially white Americans, who actually experience less of it) are terrified of is crime. This is true even when violent crime rates and property crime both are dropping to some of the lowest rates in decades.

There's also that cultural myth we can't seem to let go of: that America is a land of boundless opportunity (or could be again, if only the big, bad government would get out of the way with its pesky regulations and programs), and if any individual or group isn't doing well overall, it's somehow their own fault. Well, except when the group not doing well are working-class white people. Then it's big government's fault.

More damage done by the idiot with Presidential power in this country. Obama had a task force to address excessive use of police force after Ferguson. I believe that is why Seattle Police were required to reform.

Trump Justice Department Killed Police Reform Programs That Could Have Helped Minneapolis

HuffPo: As protests rage across the country over the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis, the Justice Department is once again brushing aside its mandate to bring broader reform to troubled police departments that have lost ― or never had ― their community’s trust.

Since President Donald Trump took office, his appointees at the Justice Department have all but eliminated the federal government’s police reform work. The Civil Rights Division’s police practices group has shrunk by half, and it hasn’t opened any major pattern-or-practice investigations that could rein in police departments that regularly violate constitutional rights.

The Trump administration effectively killed a collaborative reform initiative created by DOJ’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services that allowed cities to voluntarily implement reform, a move that left the local officials who had partnered with DOJ feeling abandoned.

Under Attorney General William Barr and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions before him, the Trump Justice Department has subscribed to a “bad apples” view of policing that dismisses systemic problems in local police departments that make unconstitutional policing routine. Sessions rolled back police reform even though he conceded he hadn’t actually read any of the DOJ police department investigations he described as “anecdotal.” Barr recently said that communities that don’t show more respect for law enforcement “might find themselves without the police protection they need.”

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I think the different reactions from different police departments across the country is evidence of the top down problem.

The problem with the 'bad apples' theory, is that people assume it's a few bad apples just festering, that need to be plucked out.
The 'bad apples spoil the whole barrel' really means that those few bad apples are spreading their badness, their infection and bacteria, to the surrounding apples. So, in the end the whole barrel needs to be disposed of, and the barrel cleaned out or disposed of.
Especially if the 'bad apples' are running the place, contacting lots of apples.

frimble3 said:

The problem with the 'bad apples' theory, is that people assume it's a few bad apples just festering, that need to be plucked out.
The 'bad apples spoil the whole barrel' really means that those few bad apples are spreading their badness, their infection and bacteria, to the surrounding apples. So, in the end the whole barrel needs to be disposed of, and the barrel cleaned out or disposed of.
Especially if the 'bad apples' are running the place, contacting lots of apples.

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I don't think it's just about bad apples. There are certainly some who will sneak in, no matter what, and they can have a corrosive effect, but this is so pervasive there has to be something about the system itself that is selecting bad apples, or making more of them go bad.

I heard this today, and found the related article on the npr site. It is mind boggling how many Black people have been killed by police just since 2014 (and I don't for a second think the issue started then). Some of these victims never even made national news.

https://www.npr.org/2020/05/29/865261916/a-decade-of-watching-black-people-die