Ongoing U.S Police Brutality and Corruption Discussion Thread

is this one of those classic ILX times when two people who agree about something argue over semantics cuz um

DC otm, you can't give them an inch on this. the job of the cops is to arrest - not try, convict, and sentence. the suspect's alleged prior actions are irrelevant and bringing them up as an excuse is a slippery slope.

whether the guy was armed and had just committed a crime is obviously an important bit of context. why 5 different cops have to shoot to kill rather than, shooting him once or twice in the legs, is the question

sorry for extraneous commas

would never say anybody's obliged to watch these videos. just that ''not gonna watch it'' and in the same breath ''but on the basis of other evidence that i take more seriously, this case seems less clear cut than others'' doesn't 100% wash with me. but to be honest, i've moved past that, because i'm more where sleeve's at. like i don't know that there's any surrounding circumstance which makes this kind of killing something about which i'd be ambivalent. put another way, i do think it remains entirely unreasonable for one cop, let alone five, to have guns drawn and ready in this situation. i recognze that knives are dangerous weapons but... really? this seems ''reasonable''? imho it seems crazy and i don't want to be in on the project of naturalizing crazy policing, or accepting it as a long-established norm.

i do think we probably agree on huge swaths of things related to this issue - pushing on the places where we don't because i think they're important, not because they're semantic.

xp yeah then come the 'i wuz trained to shoot to kill' bullshit justifications

aside from watching videos like these just to help things bring home to myself sometimes, mostly i am just interested in being able to calibrate my rejoinders to people who are oblivious to the things they can see in such videos or blinded by idiotic beliefs from even seeing them. i.e. i want to make sure i don't overstep any line of credibility when talking to them, and i want to be able to choose what's most salient to talk about.

been teaching some ethics students around this topic in the past year and while at times it's been good, the buildup of protests all year seems to have stimulated some of them to cling to the crudest pro-police garbage. : /

"Fake crying" = head down, eyes dry, head shaking no. Yes, bad people have real feelings and cry for real; he looked like he was fake crying to me.

this isn't an important matter but imo he was overdoing it for the camera but may also have been very emotional

Don't really care how he feels or acts. Awesome he got all those years behind bars to act however he wants without any power to cause harm.

once it sinks in that he ain't coming back he can start getting some cool swastika neck tattoos

does the aryan nation accept people with Japanese heritage?

i think the Japanese were only given honorary white status in apartheid south africa

Not even an indictment on this? Even if he's holding a knife, it sure looks like he's surrendering.

http://gawker.com/officials-release-second-video-in-fatal-police-shooting-1747834692

I never knew that. There's also this little tidbit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorary_Aryan#To_the_Japanese

Baltimore is on pins & needles right now waiting for first verdict in Freddie Gray case. Saw cops in camo on my way to work today. Druid Hill Park right now:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CWSSbwwUkAAFGQS.jpg

Letter from yesterday warning students that they will be arrested for walking out of school

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CWNep_lUYAAf7Qx.jpg

it doesn't say they will be arrested, it says they will "face consequences"

yeah the people whose jobs it is to make big deals out of everything are making a big deal of that. obviously kids should be allowed to protest too but schools have a reasonable interest in keeping their kids safe, and there's good reason to believe that it's not going to be safe out there if the verdict turns out a certain way

that said i'm sure this is partly being used as a cover for preventing kids from protesting

sometimes i visit the chicago breaking news Facebook and i guess this doesn't precisely count as police brutality but i noticed that the son of the police chief of bridgeview IL had quite the opinion abt minorities on one of the recent news stories, i wonder if that trickled down from dear ol dad.

i'd post the screengrabs i took but i'm unable to upload them right now and it's just sort of depressing anyway.

Got a link?

sent you an ilx mail with the pics i screencapped. it seems like the low hanging fruit of scandals but it's just gross imo.

wasn't sure how to link from the story itself and not just the whole FB page and wasn't sure it was worth posting more about, but it's on that page in the comments of a story about a cop threatening Gliniewicz investigators.

I wish that letter had said, "Like Mayor Rawlings-Blake and city police officials I am very concerned about the distinct possibility of a miscarriage of justice resulting in civil disorders following the announcement of an unjust verdict allowing corrupt and criminal behavior on the part of the police to go unpunished."

xp thanks, I have a somewhat vested interest in bridgeview politics and wasn't having any luck with my searches after reading your initial post

i read that page and sometimes click on particularly appalling posters just out of morbid curiosity, like "who the hell is this person?" and then i saw that photo of him with his police chief dad and i wasn't as shocked as i wish i could have been, in another slightly better world.

http://www.ocweekly.com/news/new-video-footage-shows-noel-aguilar-shot-from-behind-by-la-county-sheriff-deputy-in-long-beach-6844726

OC deputies appear to straight up murder a guy during an arrest after one deputy accidentally shoots the other while they're scuffling with him

LA county deputies, rather

No indictment in the death of Sandra Bland.

... nor in the death of Tamir Rice.

I don't even know what to call this anymore. "Shocking" is hardly accurate and "depressing" doesn't come close.

this chicago story is insane. sorry i should clarify, "this" being the one where the cop shoots up a house or whatever and kills two people, at least one being an innocent bystander. there are plenty of chicago stories to go around.

Guys. No indictment of Tamir Rice's murderer. I don't have anything to say. Just so sad and angry.

it's just insane.

there was no "prosecutor" in the Rice case, it was a joke

When I taught American lit, I used to teach the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in which he generates powerful outrage at an incident in which an overseer, Gore, shoots an enslaved man, Demby. Slavery sickens a society, Douglass observes, to the point where a white man can kill a black man with impunity. (Demby's master questions Gore about what happened, but he is unpunished in any way, though there were multiple enslaved witnesses to the murder.) I taught that book three years in a row at my former job, and each year supplied me a fresh black death and a white man who got away with it on whom to train our discussion (Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Mike Brown.) I wish I had Douglass's eloquence to speak the disgust I feel today. What does a white person have to do to be held accountable for killing a black child, all these years later?

urgh that's rotten

It may be time to focus more on racist scumbag prosecutors than on racist scumbag cops for a little while, because racist scumbag prosecutors have more power to protect racist scumbag cops than anyone else in the system.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/12/the_tamir_rice_grand_jury_decision_shows_that_we_give_police_too_wide_a.html

good analysis imo, but where to start?

It may be time to focus more on racist scumbag prosecutors than on racist scumbag cops for a little while, because racist scumbag prosecutors have more power to protect racist scumbag cops than anyone else in the system.

― Three Word Username, 29. december 2015 12:57 (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's probably time to focus on all parts of white supremacy...

Some people have talked about prosecutors, I know vox.com is writing a lot on the subject. Probably a useful thing for white allies to do, while #BLM focus primarily on the people actually shooting them.

Not interested, sock.

Dude? What's your problem? Perhaps take it to some other thread, keep it for another time and place?

Post as yourself or leave me alone with all of your alts.

Not that I really care if you think I'm a sock or not, I'm not looking for a discussion with you on any subject, but not only is this my only ilx-profile, I'm using parts of my real name, and I've linked to stuff written under my own name before. I'm less anonymous than you are. And even if this was a sock, again, this might not be the time and place for an anti-sock crusade?

frederik b has been around a while, twu

So have a lot of people who post with identical grammar and concerns.

But regardless: who is Frederick B. from Denmark to say what allies may argue and what BLM is to argue?

god stfu both of you

Good post.

it may not be but at least i have a few

I liked this one: "maybe you should go to the danish grocery store to buy some danish groceries for your week in denmark. feel like that would be a helpful thing to do."