Police targeted journalists covering the George Floyd protests | Hacker News Reader

Police targeted journalists covering the George Floyd protests

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56 pointsraybb12 comments

It's hard to believe there isn't some sort of order or unspoken code at this point to go after people with cameras, including the media. They have permission to spray rubber bullets so they're hitting innocent people on their porches as they march down the road.

https://streamable.com/u2jzoo

I'm inclined to believe that these orders are not coming from the top (i.e. the Governors or Police Chiefs) to go after people with cameras. I have a feeling that it is often the police forces themselves that will often spur aggression against journalists and others.

I feel throughout this we still underestimate the power of police unions and the organization of individual police officers outside of their formal duties with their departments.

Looks like Iraq, are they purposefully trying to incite armed response? :o

The conservative commander in chief has been referring to the media as “enemies of the people” for four years. Law enforcement is overwhelmingly conservative. They believe what they’re doing is right, because they are attacking the people the president says are the enemy.

To my eyes, it really looks that simple.

I don't think its a political sides kind of thing, but more of the tribalism as shown by the Stanford prison experiment.

I would agree with you if I were able to find any members of the Democratic Party calling the media "enemies of the people". As I am unable to, I must unfortunately conclude it is, in fact, a political issue -- or at the very least an issue stemming entirely from one side of the political aisle.

Additionally, you may be suffering under some misunderstandings with regard to the Stanford Prison Experiment -- long story short, the methodology is largely understood to be flawed at best (Source: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-45337-001) -- and therefore the conclusions as well. That may have contributed to misapprehending the fuller picture (nationalism) for the narrower one (tribalism).

I remain open to any new evidence that authority figures within the Democratic Party are also describing the media as "enemies of the people" -- but until that arrives, I think we can agree that in this case tribalism has been subsumed into nationalism -- since tribalism is just the low-level building blocks of nationalism anyway.

Obama was dealing with this same problem. He couldn't get the Republicans in Congress to make change in good faith.

The problem is more complicated than simple.

I agree with you that "how we got to a point where the conservative commander in chief could repeatedly label the media 'enemies of the people' without any political repercussions whatsoever" is a much more complicated topic.

I'm just saying that I think you can draw a direct line between the shameless attacks on reporters the past few days, and the words spoken over and over again by the ostensible top law enforcement agent in the country.

I have been closely following the coverage of HK protests as it was developing. I was (and still am) strongly sympathetic with the HK protesters.

I have to say, the HK police has proven to be massively more professional than the cops in Minneapolis, NYC, and many other places in the States.

HK is under a toralitarian regime, while the US is, supposedly, the bastion of freedom.

The police departments seem to have become incapable of separating the difference between "enforcing the law", and "being the law".

They also don't seem to understand that they are not on equal grounds with private citizens. They are civic servants. Police have an obligation to protect their fellow citizens, even if those citizens are protesting Police.* The amount of examples of police actively instigating violence [1] in the last 48 hours is horrifying, but perhaps not surprising. Police have a 2-4x the incident rate of domestic violence [2] than the rest of the population. And with the President tweeting support for them to respond to protests with violence, it makes sense that they would feel enabled to act accordingly.

In every city protest the exact same script has unfolded:

* A peaceful protest starts

* A heavily militarized police force descends on the protest and begins oppressing it without overtly instigating any engagement

* SOMEONE pushes things over the line. That someone might be a protestor, but honestly looking around and reading the news it seems like it is equally likely right now to be Police themselves, or a provocateur masquerading as a protestor.

* Police overreact, violence and property destruction abounds

* Mayor/governor instigate curfew

* AHA - now any private citizen on the street is automatically a criminal

* Police take the initiative and run with it targeting journalists and instigating violence.

So what's next? I think this needs to be a reckoning in the US unlike any since 9/11. 9/11 created The Department Of Homeland Security. And regardless of what you think of the execution of that program, the point was that it was a serious action designed to take the threat of terrorist attacks against the US seriously. I believe the US needs an equally powerful independent government agency to oversee local police departments. There are simply no checks and balances otherwise. No oversight. No one watches The Watchmen. Before you tell me that this is a massive Federal overreach, I believe this could be similar in scope to Desegregation and School Integration, which were federal top-down projects.

P.S. If you turn this thread around to talk about the "looters", so help you god. You are a lost cause. So let's just get this out of the way: No, looting is not morally justifiable. But in the grand scheme of things, the moral failings of those protestors that are taking this opportunity to loot is incomparable with the overall message of the protest or the harm inflected upon the African American community by centuries of systemic racism.

* * Or at least, they SHOULD. I think we can all see that is not actually the case.

* [1] https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1266952661791674370?s=1...

* [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-...

I like your proposal, but policies can't be shaped purely with respect to the grand scheme of things. All police reform proposals in the near future are going to face a simple and important question: will this proposal, if implemented, compromise their ability to stop hooligans from burning down my neighborhood? Reformers are going to have to learn to say "no, and here's why" rather than "you are a lost cause" or "racism is more important".

Of course they are. Protests are media agents first and foremost. Entrenched power has always tried to suppress unfavorable media coverage of protest events, and protest planners put a lot of effort into optics.

This doesn't make it right, but given that cops are social groups looking after their own interests, it's hardly surprising.

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