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Comment by umwhat999 | Hacker News Reader

Um, what? I read the story of his SF arrest. That's... not what happened.

He was arrested because the police resented that he did not immediately 'respect my authoritah'. He was not interfering with paramedics. He was a safe distance away.

He got put on psychiatric hold by the police as retribution for insisting it is reasonable for him to have the right to see a doctor for medical treatment.

Medical treatment which was only required because the police physically assaulted him.

It's very hard to imagine a retelling of his story which doesn't involve substantial police misconduct.

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In the time it took you to make that throwaway account you could have read this:

http://sfist.com/2014/02/18/young_tech_worker_who_called_911...

or this:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/779439/police_report_ann...

LOL, he stated he was a medic and tried to push his way past the police.

That's a... selective reading of that police report.

The idea that it is right for police to violently enforce their every whim if one does not immediately obey all commands is a serious problem.

For one, only a small subset of all possible commands a police officer could make are commands which one is legally obligated to follow.

Secondly, I think we want a society where police choose constructive dialog over violence.

Nothing about this incident was necessary or proportionate.

Unnecessary violence has made policing dangerous lately. A few years ago it was more dangerous to supervise lawncare, be a taxi driver, collect garbage, or be a handyman than it was to be a police officer.

I wonder if this year's escalations will lead to policing actually becoming a dangerous profession. :(

>Secondly, I think we want a society where police choose constructive dialog over violence.

seeing how deep the police got addicted to violence one can only wonder whether it is possible for them to get sober at all.

I mean you can't make that up - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/07/2... . Just make sure to watch the video. The police tried to shoot the autistic patient even after the therapist clearly explained to them everything, and there were absolutely no danger to anybody. The police screwed the shot [fortunately] and instead of killing the autistic patient they hit the therapist in the leg.

Wow. I'm speechless.

I get that everyone's on edge, but please, "PUT AWAY THE GUNS".

America has many consensual crimes (drugs, prostitution, etc.), and that makes a very large percentage of the population criminals who must live outside the law.

I'm not sure this can be fixed until it is unusual for a police interaction with a citizen to be a police-criminal interaction. If most of the people you meet as a law enforcement officer are criminals who interact with the world of drugs (a world which currently features privatized violence-based contract enforcement), then I guess a person's prior probability matrix gets fucked up.

I thought it was a scapegoating situation: the light-skinned guy didn't do what they wanted, so they shot the black guy.

it gets even "better" - the police who shot black therapist is now saying that he was trying to save the therapist from the autistic patient. If not for the video, we'd never knew how really low their lies are. The police demonstrate all the symptoms of addiction - doing their drug (violence) and lying about it in the face of obviously contradicting evidence.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/22/487027848/...

Man! The fact that such explanation even came to your mind ... It would be hilarious if it wasn't a such tragic indication of a new low police have reached in public perception and the cost of it shouldered by the blacks and others.

That sfist piece reads like a smear job.

Love the casual insinuations that he and his friend were just leaving a gay bar and are part of a sort of commune.

Like they carry any sort of weight or relevance.

Yellow journalism at its best.

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