Safety is important, protesters (and even journalists...) have been livestreaming themselves innocently doing nothing (in contrast to other media's hyper-focusing on "looting") then getting shot with rubber bullets. One of them reportedly has permanent blindness in the left eye as a result.
Police brutality in response to a protest against police brutality is truly disturbing.
There was nothing but peaceful protesters standing around, not blocking traffic. No vandalism anywhere in sight. This was in Louisville, KY.
The police fired rubber bullets at the group of people carrying her away to a place on the other side of the line of humvees blocking the street to where the ambulance could reach her.
Everything most middle-income Americans think about our police forces is wrong.
It's legal to be outside your house during the curfew in Minneapolis [2].
> Can I be outside my house (on my property) after 8 p.m. and before 6 a.m.?
> Yes.
Even if it weren't legal to be outside on your own property from 8p-6a, this isn't proper enforcement of the law.
Also note, we take orders directly from the governor of the state, not the police, nor the president of the US unless activated.
It should always be legal to be outside on your own property. Anything less is unacceptable.
https://twitter.com/MNNationalGuard/status/12670051854922260...
This doesn't quite disagree with your statement, but I'd like to ensure the correct officers are identified and disciplined.
I know folks on HN like strict interpretations and reasoning of what's legal or illegal, but all of that gets very blurred during a riot when the situation at any given time is on the verge of getting out of control. It just isn't time for a high-school forensics debate when people are in riot gear.
If a group of highly armed police or military are marching through your street and demanding you go inside--- it's probably better to GO INSIDE at least until they're gone.
Edit: just to be clear, given all the huff and puff by police of needing riot gear, armored trucks, giant guns, I haven’t seen any report in Minneapolis of any armed protestors or any cops coming under fire. But that doesn’t stop the cops from shooting (less than lethal) rounds.
- shooting people on their porch is the cause of chaos and confrontation you claim police are trying to prevent
- fuck those guys
Their responsibility is to make sure the riot doesn't spread and stop the riot. They can't do that effectively if they have to wade through a massive crowd of onlookers appearing wherever they go. Bad actors easily mix in to situations like this and make the situation extremely dangerous for everyone. If someone doesn't respond to direct commands in such an emergency, they're going to be seen as potential bad actors.
It's totally reasonable to demand that people stay inside their houses while the police are securing the area.
My guess? Absolutely NOTHING will happen to those police that paintballed the porch gawkers after very clearly telling them to go inside.
Having seen what happened in Baltimore in 2015 and now Philly, I am terrified of the idea of a city going up in flames when a riot gets out of control. It's been too close the times that I've seen it personally. Historically, it has been far worse.
What's next? Saying that George Floyd was clearly at fault because he was trying to breath, where clearly the officer didn't want him to, so the officers actions were justified?!
“Follow up on video of people getting rubber bullets shot at them in their doorway from a source that was there. This was personally texted to me. Source is a teacher that works at my elementary school.
Here’s what was posted.
‘That is my blue house across the street. Apparently this video has gone viral. What they didn’t show was the 20- 30 minutes of the rioters that surrounded the houses, were all over our neighborhood, the street, rioters running through my yard and screaming on the other side of my garden level bedroom window, and hiding in my alley. The neighbors are saying they were ‘just having a beer outside,’ as if this came out of nowhere and while it seems extreme from the national guard/police, the rioters were flooded in our neighborhood and they were trying to get them out. That was terrifying, and to be honest after being at the Minneapolis community clean up today and seeing all the burned down buildings, I am glad nothing was burned down or broken into. And they got them out. Idk who is out there at night! And yes black lives matter!!!! But these riots are scary AF. And they haven’t returned and are gone now and we are totally safe, and all had been quiet for hours. And apparently my upstairs neighbor had no idea the rioters were here at all ... #minneapolisriots #blacklivesmatter #georgefloyd #helpusall #feltprotected”
Edit: apparently, additional information is... controversial? I don’t agree with the police conduct, but there is additional context here.
I hate to say it, but I'm doubting the veracity of this account. There's nothing in the video - trash or debris from a large crowd, in particular - to indicate that the area they were in, specifically, was in need of such force. And, again, the curfew did not forbid being outside on one's own property.
If we're going to second-guess what we see with our own eyes - that these people were shot at by police without provocation - it's perfectly reasonable to then continue to drill down on what happened; question accounts, question logic. Or, we could employ Occam's Razor.
Anyway, as a practical matter we should also be asking for the RUF that these police were operating under. That would clear up a lot.
Here's some additional context that's just as valid as yours: the "rioters" were actually defending the neighborhood from the police who had been there before your context began. The police were beating random people and shooting pets. The person that told me this lives in one of the houses in the video and she's a retired nurse who volunteers to care for hospice patients.
Police do not deserve the benefit of the doubt, ever, when they are working in their official capacity. They should have to bring proof.
Where are all of the “good policemen” who are saying racial profiling during “stop and frisk” is wrong.
If they are complicit and silent they are not “good”.
And I bet you have never been thought of as “suspicious” for walking from your house down the street to your mailbox.
This doesn't negate the bad apples and all the bad things that have happened or in any way go against the protests. Just try to be aware when classifying an entire group as bad based hand picked information presented to you.
Well, at least there'll be evidence for that, right? Dead pets?
Screaming isn’t rioting.
That statement is a bit vague, everyone is going to substitute their own interpretation in. The police don't target racial minorities because they are racist. People who want power over others sign up for policing - and then go after groups who have the least ability to fight back.
The middle income might know the symptoms, but they are missing the cause. The cause is that if a fellow wants to hurl someone else to the ground, kick them and keep them down without a fair fight then their best chance as getting to that situation is to sign on to the police. This is an inescapable structural pressure that needs constant attention.
I agree it's a severe problem, but I don't agree it's inescapable.
It's a job that attracts brutal people only because it's a job that lets them get away with brutality. If the cycle of allowing brutality and attracting brutes could be broken, there's a good chance it'd stay broken.
The police fraternity knows all about getting other cops to fall into line - just look at the "blue wall of silence" and police union "get out of jail free" cards. That same pressure couldn't be applied against brutality.
You have a very sick society and until you realize it is not all the fault of one group it will persist.
Is there a good reason to believe that it's true?
However, it implies antagonized population where even innocent people will avoid police contact, whether reporting of crime, informing to police or otherwise cooperating with them as much as possible. It implies that people dont see police as an institution to protect them and dont use them as such.
More aggressive may mean quotas for arrests - leading to arrests that have nothing to do with public safety. It is easier to arrest someone apparently poor for loitering or sorta kinda open bottle of alcohol then someone actually violent.
Same with fines. For example, if the masks are mandatory outside, cops can either issue warning or give you a find. In most cases, warning is enough to make people comply and take it seriously. Fine is used only when people refuse to comply. If cops were aggressive and issued fine immediately to everyone who had half nose out of mask, we would not be safer.
More aggressive means exactly that and nothing more.
At any rate, even if general society is more violent, that is not a justification for supposed police to add to the mayhem. When police officers are not bound by the law they purport to uphold, then they are actually just another gang.
> You have a very sick society
Yeah, but it's slowly getting better. Not this week, obviously, but the trend is there.
We are a nation built on genocide and psychotic slavery. Check out "An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Indigenous_Peoples'_History...
So the reasoning that they act like this because of their dangerous job is a myth.
Source: https://www.ajc.com/business/employment/these-are-the-most-d...
When people say "being a police officer" is risky they obviously mean the part where you go around physically enforcing law and order, not the other parts that are actually the majority of many long-term police careers. But the fact that the current beat cop will in 5 years have a much safer job doesn't mean that the current job is not very risky.
I’m not sure if soldiers in war actually are given all that much latitude over murdering civilians; if caught they do tend to be punished.
It's the root of many of our problems.
To see the real root of the problem, compare the USA to other western democracies such as in Europe. The structure of society is very different, the nature of poverty, the number of people living as an economic underclass, the acceptance in the USA that poor areas of cities will just be fucked and that's normal, the presence of a never-ending source of ignorant, and often racist, people from small-town America, and the presence of a never-ending source of guns. Of course a lot of the above is related to the lack of a strong belief across the voting population that government should protect and support the poorest in society.
Things won't change in America until the above changes meaningfully. That would require the majority of the population to start thinking more like the liberal half, and there is no reason to think that that will happen any time soon.
This is certainly not limited to the USA and you will readily find it in European democracies as well. A significant portion of French people have long since assumed that the banlieues are hopeless and there is little sense trying to improve them. In Eastern Europe you will find the same attitudes about Roma neighborhoods. Even in the Nordic countries which are held up as models of social equality, one finds the genesis of immigrant-heavy neighborhoods that, local people tell themselves, will forever have the problems that immigrant-heavy neighborhoods stereotypically have.
"According to the Washington thinktank the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), the average student in Singapore is 3.5 years ahead of her US counterpart in maths, 1.5 years ahead in reading and 2.5 in science. Children in countries as diverse as Canada, China, Estonia, Germany, Finland, Netherland, New Zealand and Singapore consistently outrank their US counterparts on the basics of education."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/07/us-education...
All this means that it isn't really evident that money doesn't translate into better results. It isn't strictly funding, that is true - poverty seriously affects how well students can perform, for example - but it should be quite obvious that a school that cannot afford maintenance, proper computers for students to learn on, or enough staff so that classes are a manageable size can't really teach as well as a moderately funded school.
Some of the worst cities have the beat funded schools. Minneapolis spends as much per student as Switzerland. Baltimore spends more, and spends as much of more than the rich suburban schools around it. The US also has relatively low rates or private K-12 compared to the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Belgium, etc.
At least part of the problem is cops themselves.
Racism is universal amongst humans. We are tribal primates, after all. We need to admit the biases exist and address them head-on.
It stands to reason that having a bias against out groups once increased an individuals chance of survival. Now it is actively harming society. If we can't rise above our primitive impulses, we are doomed.
We need to stop telling ourselves these lies about who we are and what we're capable of.
Let's say 1% of the population commits crimes.
Let's also, for the sake of argument, say all crimes are committed by black people.
Of the general population, 10% is black.
If you profile all black people, you will indeed profile the 1% of the population that commits crimes, but you will also profile 9% of the population that does not commit crimes.
And before you say "not the entirety of the 10% black population is profiled": maybe ask some black people about this. It's not 100% of the black population that gets profiled but certainly a very significant percentage.
And even if it's just half or even a quarter of the black population that you're profiling, you're still profiling a lot of innocent people.
This is the reason why profiling is bad.
(and note that in reality the figures are even worse).
If there are credible reports of a white man committing murders it doesn't make any sense to waste resources listing mainly female Asian suspects, for example. There are also other similar issues. For example, if a crime happens on my street I expect to be treated as more of a suspect based only on my proximity.
The issue of racism is (and needs to be) grounded in things other than rational resource allocation.
However, it's clear that the vast majority of resources are devoted to black areas and poor areas, and to responding to directly "violent" crime. A mugging is more sensational than white collar crime, but from a purely utilitarian standpoint, I'm not sure it's rational to devote more resources to catching the mugger when, for example, there is widespread wage theft depressing incomes in the mugger's city. Which causes more damage in the long run?
If all crime is committed by South Asian women, you're right that it would be madness not to use that information to target crime-fighting measures such as, for example, only looking for suspects that are female and have a South Asian suspects.
Profiling, however, where you preventively search if not outright harass people, is something entirely different: if one in ten South Asian women engage in crime, every time you preventively search and harass one of them, you have a ninety percent chance of searching and harassing someone who is innocent.
For example, Finland has a large number of firearms, but police don't come to a crime scene guns ablaze unless they have a very good reason to think there is a need to use them.
This incident in MN with United States citizens getting shot at on their own porch is a much milder form of thuggery — it was not legal application of force — that Palestinians have been living with for decades.
Karma.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/joint-us-israel-police-...
This is false. There is a long history of police membership in, involvement and collaboration with explicitly racist groups.
Embracing this human weakness is part of developing the structures to keep us accountable.
Those who are vehemently racist are likely only a minority of the expressions of racial injustice which minorities face as a lifestyle in America. The answer to both should point to structural solutions rather than making this an individual moral matter, asking people to monitor whether they're consciously racist.
No, they're not! One is quite obviously extreme, the other is quite obviously not. Some things are, and some things are not. Something that isn't can't be. I apologize for paraphrasing a disgusting piece of crap guy in this context, but... please understand that your nothing-matters philosophy is helping people get killed/the people killing them go without accountability.
These things can be taught directly. There is nothing special about it, and it's not about strengths or weaknesses. Most human brains work pretty similarly and have the same strengths and weaknesses, all of which can be managed or improved.
Depends on what you mean by “they.” Individual officers are a mixed bag, but someone else mentioned the ties between police and right-wing/racist groups. “The police” as an institution however is definitely racist.
> The police don't target racial minorities because they are racist. People who want power over others sign up for policing - and then go after groups who have the least ability to fight back.
The fact that racial minorities have the least ability to fight back is a significant component of institutional racism. Why are they in that position in the first place? Because the USA has not yet excised from its culture the racist policies, values, and attitudes that it has held since before its foundation.
The police exist to preserve the established order. If you believed a social order can exist without being preserved by violence, then i'd call you an anarchist, (i'd call myself one too.) If you believe anything remotely resembling the present social order can be preserved without violence then you're naive, and very few people are that naive, least of all the police. Under what circumstances violence is required to preserve the established order may be shocking, but the individual police officers aren't pushing the system around, the system is pushing them around.
Sociopathic bully cops would ve weeded out. They are covered for instead. Video of them murdering people would prompt action from the system to get rid of them, but the system declines to prosecute them, and i'd guess a third of the country hmms and haws and theorizes about what the murder victim should've done to avoid getting murdered. The victims of these bad cops would be treated by the media the same as any other person whom tragedy befell, instead the media digs up dirt on them.
Individual bad cops can't exert the kind of pressure on the system needed to do all that. It's the established social order expressing itself.
The police don't target racial minorities because they are racist.
After moving to the suburbs, I realized that most Americans base their opinions on their own police forces. The last time I got pulled over in the exurbs where I live, the officer basically apologized for pulling me over. Things are very different an hour away from here in DC.
That it is possible to film ethically is not the point.
Particularly if you include sharing the video as part of "filming" then there's a lot to consider which this goes into.
Two things to me are simple and good examples - does what I'm filming accurately reflect what's happening? If I deliberately avoid filming certain things then I can distort the facts. The other is around consent of the other people in the video (more important when it comes to sharing).
It's best to not release it to anyone except to the victim's lawyers who will make sure the video supports their case instead of undermining it.
The prosecution is definitely not allowed to suppress evidence that would demonstrate someone's innocence, but I don't think the same is true of the defense.
Providing said video doesn't seem any more self-incrimination than the prosecution asking for a warrant to get written evidence that is in possession of the accused, say, though the line there might start getting blurry if the video is something routinely filmed from the accused's viewpoint. But if it's filmed by a third party, I doubt the self-incrimination provisions would extend to it in any way...
My take is that this situation applies to evidence the defense has acquired. I don't think the _defense_ is required to share it voluntarily (although it could probably still be subpoenaed if the prosecution was aware of its existence). I.e. if Joe Shmoe was being charged with burglary, and someone sent his a lawyer a video of him committing the crime, his lawyer is not required to disclose the existence of the video. If the prosecution found out that it existed, they could still subpoena it. Although I don't know if you could subpoena it from Joe Shmoe, that's beyond my limited reading. You could definitely subpoena it from whoever sent it to the defense, as their right against self-incrimination doesn't apply.
I am unsure about the status of a video as "physical evidence". My assumption would be that a VHS tape is physical evidence, but an mp4 attachment to an email is not.
As an example, if a client gives his lawyer a murder weapon, the defense has to disclose that. If the client tells his lawyer where the murder weapon is buried, the lawyer is not required to disclose that [2].
[1] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/criminal_justice/publicat...
[2] https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=... page 5 (page 900 if you go by the numbers on the text).
Trials are preceded by a long process of discovery and, in general both sides will have access to all evidence that is going to be used in the trial.
Edit: incorrect punctuation marks snuck in.
It is. What's not always ethical is to film and share identifiable features of people who are opposing it. The article discusses this. It should be discussed in much more detail. The history of police and vigilantes targeting people for harassment and retribution following mere involvement in protest against police brutality or abuse, especially targeting people of color who are already targeted for harassment and abuse by police, is as old as the force itself. The history of using video to identify targets is as old as access to film police brutality itself.
There are dozens of videos from the last several days of obvious, criminal abuse by police around the US. Some of it is obviously responsive to nothing the victims are doing, obviously retaliation for the mere fact that people are standing up against the murder that sparked this set of protests. If that's what they're doing on film, what are they willing to do after the fact, when eyes are on other problems, with carelessly published videos of the faces of organizers?
Excellent comment. But generally speaking people deserve the police they get, just like they get the govt. they deserve.
The issue is filming what else might be going on around, which may be sensitive.