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Comment by cheesecracker | Hacker News Reader

The triggering cause was the act of one policeman and his three colleagues who stood by (which might indicate the constriction was perhaps a kind of standard procedure that went wrong - or not. Personally I am waiting for an official verdict). That's not "the police". If you say that's "the police", you can also say "that's black people" if a black person murders somebody.

In any case, there is no excuse for riots.

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Hmm, I've seen current USA riot footage where the police seemingly got spooked (by an umbrella), and proceeded to gas a couple of hundred peaceful protestors.

Some riots and current outbreaks have certainly been caused by police.

In other incidents riot police have been filmed purposefully and willfully attacking already subdued members of the public; looking around first to check for observers of course! One of the cases the policeman put a weapon in the have of a subdued arrestee as a precursor to beating them.

These sorts of actions inflame the public and cause ongoing rioting.

It's been interesting witnessing quite measured, in relative terms, vigilante justice against some rioters too.

Not sure how to get from being gassed by the police to looting shops, though.

I haven't seen that footage, but of course I have heard of cases of violence against protesters. Doesn't really prove a deliberate approach to me. Maybe some police officers are also just human and get angry when people hurl stones at them and spit at them. If it's an excuse for the protesters, why not for the police. Sure, you'd hope they'd be trained in restraint, but at the end of the day, they are humans.

Also some footage may not tell the whole story. And maybe those cops were legitimately spooked by the umbrella. Better safe than sorry. I can't really blame them, wouldn't want to do their job.

In general, I think it would be wise not to provoke the police (or people with guns in general), don't wave around with objects that could be mistaken for guns, stuff like that? They should teach that in US schools, but every action movie teaches it, too. There is always that scene where a suspect reaches for their ID and then pauses because he realizes police might think he reaches for a weapon.

>Maybe some police officers are also just human and get angry when people hurl stones at them and spit at them. //

Yes, I've much sympathy with this. Police are human too - but just as if I get angry and lash out at someone in the street, without appropriate mitigations, I will be charged with assault - so too should police. That's rule of law in operation.

If you can stomach it then look on Reddit, the riot footage is illuminating IMO (of course remember the inherent selection and PoV biases).

Of course police officers who assault people should be charged with assault. I don't think anybody says otherwise.

But then charge the individual officers, not "the police".

you are intentionally diminishing the issues at hand. the police, yes "the police", have increasingly been militarized, abuse their power, and seen a general lack of repercussions when they do something wrong, even heinous crimes. this is systemic. whether you think that this was "just" a bad egg with three other bad eggs standing around or not, which in itself requires jumping through hoops, these issues are well discussed and documented and are systemic.

now, couple that with systemic issues of rascim throughout all of american society, of which the police are part of, you have a terrible mix of rascism, power, lack of worry of consequences, and a general bad attitude of their role in society in "the police". that leaves the general public at risk and people of color at a substantially greater risk.

the point is that this isn't just a one off case. it happens time and time again. i have seen video after video of it, and that's just the ones captured on film! (still don't face any consequences.) i have seen a video of a black emt who had a patient inside pulled over and choked by a police officer because the police officer felt he hadn't yielded properly to his lights even though the call he was on was obviously less important than choking an emt with a patient. there's just countless other videos and documented cases.

so please, take your false rhetoric elsewhere. these are actual problems. if you think it's just a couple bad eggs, then think about what happens when there's bad eggs spread throughout the country. that's what systemic issues are.

riots and particularly looting are not great. but consider what they generally represent. they represent pent up anger of those at the bottom who feel they don't have any other recourse. some do indeed want to incite violence, but that doesn't invalidate the huge line of events that got us here. i would also ask that you view the police as an active participant in the rioting. i have seen video of police actively destroying property without a protester in site. the media is also a participant because we cannot trust what they report as truth.

I'd rather look at such issues by data, rather than emotional responses to singular incidents. I'm not even saying that the police has no issues. But it certainly can't be inferred from that one incident, or even from, say, a dozen incidents over a couple of years. That's nothing compared to the millions of police interactions with the public every year.

I think incidents like this murder or what it was, should be treated like a bug in the system, and protocols should be adjusted to prevent such accidents. If it was a murder, I would still call it an accident in terms of the system, but the accident then was hiring a murderer, which surely isn't deliberate by the system.

I've read (but can't confirm) that kneeling on suspects to constrain them is outlawed in many places in the US already, but wasn't yet in Minnesota. So maybe some places have learned that it is a risky approach, and others haven't.

From afar US police looks scary and brutal. On the other hand, the criminals they encounter may also be more brutal and dangerous than in other countries. So I'd first like to hear some of their side before making a judgement.

Other problems are not so easy to solve, like lack of consequences. It sounds easy, but I would guess you can not make the job too risky for police officers. I don't know enough details about policing in the US, but one example that may illustrate what I mean: here in Germany, midwives now have the problem that they can not get insurance anymore, because of huge liabilities should anything go wrong during birth. Unfortunately, nobody can guarantee a safe birth, so many midwives can not continue their jobs. Not saying police officers shouldn't be liable for anything, just that I can imagine it is not easy to find a good balance.

As for "PoC are at greater risk", I'd like to see the data supporting that thesis. Especially since many police officers are PoC themselves, and apparently they kill more PoC than white police officers. For whatever reason (I imagine they are more often on duty in predominantly black neighborhoods), but it at least challenges the hypothesis that the police is inherently racist.

> Especially since many police officers are PoC themselves, and apparently they kill more PoC than white police officers.

Because they're police officers. It is and always has been the mandate of US police forces to violently repress non-whites, particularly Black people. The skin color of the cop doesn't change the function. Racism is not 'a white person did something mean to a non-white person'.

I'd like to see the proof of that. Maybe they are just confronted with armed, trigger happy criminals every day and therefore have to answer with guns, too.

And what are you saying, without white people, there would be no need for police? PoC would just get by, no crime whatsoever? That seems unlikely to me.

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