Git Repo of Police Brutality During the 2020 George Floyd Protests
github.com
github.com
Here in philly, police insisted they tear gassed protestors because they were in imminent danger. Two weeks later, they failed to find any evidence to support that, despite many camera angles. Finally issued an apology. Turns out the other side of the story was actually the same as the protestors' side; they just didn't want to admit it.
Collecting evidence is pretty much job #1 for the police. Without that, they can't establish guilt of the accused.
When dozens of cops were involved in a beatdown and not a single one can produce a shred of evidence, we assume that the protesters were innocent.
Excellent point. If denial / lack of evidence is the SoP for any Police Department, what are they even doing? Defense Lawyers would barely have to work for their pay.
I understand that this is a hot issue with very polarized sides, but in what kinds of circumstances is having more data bad, except to intentionally support bias?
Please understand that my question is only to understand why, in the context of accumulating data, is trying to obtain more/better data NOT a good thing?
I do not wish to debate what is already being said in the many comments already, so if it helps to change the context of the data in question in order to discuss, that sounds like a good idea to me.
However, there is such a large corpus of evidence against the police in these protests, I have to wonder if the people asking for more context are doing so in good faith, or rather to argue for the innocence of the police. Having been personally on the receiving end of police violence during these protests, it bothers me that anyone could look at this wealth of videos and see anything other than a clear pattern of institutional violence being wielded against those who are in opposition to just such violence.
- Listing videos of police brutality during protests without also listing videos of protestors brutally attacking the police perhaps creates a dissonance to the counter party?
I think there have been a few incidents were cops were attacked but they are far and few between, but listing those would help clear the accussation of hypocrisy.
Furthermore, I personally think that we should separate police brutality videos in normal civic life (before the protests began) to gather evidence of systemic violence vs. the enraged/emotionally outraged protests that both sides were not willing to concede. I categorize them as different.
Given that this is a resource for events of police brutality, it should be no surprise that contributors are likely to be biased to report events favorable to the assertion of brutality. The general premise asked, "what wrong thing was done to you/your people?" which is likely to result in emotionally biased response. If it was a dataset of reports of interactions between two different ant colonies, for example, the general bias is likely to be significantly lower.
If the goal is to understand the relationship between a population and their police, then obtaining data from both sides would be ideal. Of course, that's not what this data set is, which is why some people are raising concern of bias. As a data set, it's use is limited to support one aggrieved side. This is not much different from training ML models on, say, only Caucasian faces: it may work if the intent is to recognize or generate Caucasian faces, but it is by no means general purpose. As such, it seems reasonable to question the fitness and intent of this data set.
No data set is perfect, and we'll never have "all the facts." But I don't think upholding inherently-prone-to-bias data as "good enough" is a reasonable response to questions about its bias. We cannot achieve perfection, but that doesn't justify denial of bias in the data.
On the matter of "sea-lioning", I've never heard the term before, and I'm not sure if I've ever been exposed to this type of trolling because to recognize it would require me to be able to read minds. However, I understand the forum guidelines charge us to assume the best interpretation of any comment, so I am disinclined to assume that people here asking for more data are trolling. The essence of claiming "sea-lioning" appears, at least at face value, to be an alternative to saying "I don't have to explain myself to you" while maintaining the illusion of taking the high road.
People have brought up the very reasonable concern that the data is extremely prone to bias, and those people are being silenced. It seems this is because it's not a popular idea to challenge the aggrieved party, not because the data is somehow unbiased and they're asking for something unreasonable. This seems unusual for an otherwise truth-seeking community.
Perhaps I am wrong, and I recognize everyone has their own bias and not everyone always acts in good faith. I have just come to expect more from this community than what I've seen in these comments. It seems good faith is not assumed in many cases among these many conversations.
Depends if ALL data is collected or ONLY data that supports certain viewpoints.
The people who built this Github repo voluntarily spent their own time and effort to do so. The people here on HN who think the repo is incomplete can do exactly the same thing if they want to--put in some effort--and thereby address the concerns that they themselves raised.
I generally object to comments here that demand more info, more citations, or complain there might be something missing. How about: do your own work.
"Self-starters teaching themselves what they need to know" is an idea that finds powerful agreement here on HN when it comes to developing software. Somehow, though, on other topics, there sometimes appears a group of commenters who seem more inclined to sit back, complain, and demand answers from everyone else.
I will say that it has occurred to me that demands for more data might not always be in good faith. It has occurred to me that such open-ended questioning might be a convenient way to undermine conclusions that contradict personal beliefs--while avoiding direct conflict over the substance.
Edit: Oh nice, there are backups of videos as well, and there's even an ipfs source.
In that case, unfortunately, the videos are only stored on youtube and twitter, so you cannot backup them easily just by cloning the repo.
On one side you have police brutalizing journalists and shooting people in the face. On the other side you have not people getting brutalized by the police. Fair and balanced, I'm sure. Or do you think that shooting people in the face is the appropriate police response to property damage?
No, but it does _include_ it. Is it your opinion that only journalists should not be shot in the face? What are your feelings re: knees on necks for 8 minutes and 46 seconds with hands in pockets looking around like nothing's wrong even though the guy with the neck went completely unresponsive minutes before the knee moved? Maybe we should ask how many police necks George Floyd put his knee on.
How can any reasonably intelligent person be against fact-based decision making?
Does it matter? They're being investigated and prosecuted regardless[1], because they're criminals. We expect police to behave better than criminals.
Society is always going to have some crime, and we will continue to investigate and prosecute it. But there should be zero tolerance for crimes by cops. Otherwise we can't trust them, and everyone becomes less safe.
1. https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/18/21295301/philadelphia-pro...
Where crimes, such as burglary and assault, are being committed, police will generally be called upon to act. A subset of those responses will involve police violence. One would hope that such police violence only occurs in self defense, but we know that to not always be the case. So yes, the two things are mathematically correlated. One drives the other. It would be interesting to be able to tell what the incidence rate is, rather than just seeing a group of cherry-picked incidents designed with the sole intent of satisfying the public's appetite for a specific narrative.
Let’s get to the fun part: “if cops perceive someone to be a criminal, how violent will we allow them to be, relative to how violent the perceived criminal is?”
In the case of the cops assaulting that vigil for Elijah McClain (it was a peaceful gathering with people listening to a couple violin players) I’d argue that the cops were perpetrating violence at a level about 100x relative to the people they were trying to police (even if you consider that folks may have been “yelling mean things” at them).
Personally, I would consider 1.1x acceptable, maybe 1.5x in some situations. And so every time I see cops blowing through that threshold and being even 5x or 10x more violent than the people they’re policing, I perceive that as a massive injustice, I think those cops should get fired, and I get pretty angry.
My interpretation is that the majority of people are simply responding to the trend of police responding with extreme violence more and more readily in situations which absolutely do not require it.
Right now we are seeing video after video of cops tear gassing civilians for throwing empty water bottles at them, running over civilians using SUVs for "refusing to disperse" and knocking out old folks who are going "Hey man, what if this is a bad idea though?".
The ratio right now is so high, the kinds of conversations you may want to have aren't even relevant.
And, if caught, protestors are being held legally accountable (as well they should), while police officers, even after egregious misconduct, often get reinstated:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/police-in-misconduct-cases...
This is the most insidious justification of police brutality I’ve ever seen, here or elsewhere, even if it’s unintentional. It takes a position that police brutality and rioting/looting are two sides of the same coin and that we can (or should) only address whichever one is worse by some numeric calculation.
Who cares what the RATIO of cop violence vs protestor violence?
Do you know why we don’t need the “other side “of this? It’s because the police already do this on the other side. They are free to make arrests using their own evidence, including their own eyewitness, their own body cameras, their own dash cameras, and any CCTV they get access to. Some even use these videos!
Police are arresting protestors like crazy, thousands in the last month alone.
You know who else is documenting all the violence and looting caused by protesters? Every news outlet, it’s the only protest related content they bother to show because it’s the only part of the protest that’s interesting to watch for most people.
The purpose of this database is to collect and display evidence so that violent police can be arrested and charged. Violent protestors are usually arrested immediately, many are picked up later at home and a small handful of organizers are assassinated in the years following (see Ferguson)
We don’t need any help stopping protestor violence, we need help stopping police violence.
This "both sides" framing is irrational. If criminals perform a number of bank robberies does that mean police officers should be allowed to perform a similar number of bank robberies? Of course not, that would be absurd and missing the whole point of a police force.
Like another commenter downthread, I spent some time looking through incident reports in my own State, and found some of them to either be simply unsubstantiated claims, or videos of police reasonably appearing to be doing the very dangerous job of managing a riot.
There are valid concerns of the validity and objectivity of many of these alleged incident reports. By commingling the few truly reprehensible actions with objectively necessary riot control, the site loses its objectivity and fairness, and does harm to its intended goal. In Reddit parlance, it becomes a circle jerk.
I think the fundamental problem with many of these incidents is that the provocation of rioting has been used, not in all cases but certainly in many, to incite a police response which is then filmed and condemned as if unprovoked or unnecessary.
The vast majority of police are heroes. And every community depends on their police to provide a mission critical service. The ability of police to provide this service in cities like Minneapolis and NYC has been dramatically curtailed by a violent political uprising which has damaged billions of dollars of property and driven homicide rates up nearly 100% year over year.
IMO the fatal flaw in the response to protests against police is to send police to stand in front of them and take the abuse. You don’t put protesters and counter-protests next to each other to face off. It seems to me particularly unfair and indignant to have black police officers on the line being screamed at by white protesters about Black Lives Matter, to stand silently while they are verbally denigrated and abused for doing their job, which can lawfully include using force to disperse a riot. If the target of a large protest is the police themselves, the National Guard should be called in to provide crowd control and defend life and property if needed. This has the double benefit of not providing a standing target for the protesters ire, and not creating a self-fulfilling prophecy / feedback loop of aggression.
Edit: I was able to pull this citation from a previous discussion regarding police and perjury:
Myron W. Orfield, Jr., Deterrence, Perjury, and the Heater Factor, supra note 13, at 83:
> Respondents, including prosecutors, estimate that police commit perjury between 20% and 50% of the time they testify on Fourth Amendment issues.
It should also be noted that many of these respondents did not consider lying at a suppression hearing perjury, infra text accompanying note 47, which would have the effect of artificially deflating these percentages.
We can also look at what happens to cops who do become whistleblowers - it does happen, after all. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any case that ended well for the whistleblower long-term - best case, they get cold shoulder and silent treatment until they resign; and worst case is something like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft
Note, by the way, that in this story, it was basically the entire precinct involved one way or the other to gang up on the whistleblower, including his entire management chain. And if you believe Adrian, then manager involvement went all the way up to NYPD Commissioner. I think at that point, it's not unreasonable to assume that in NYPD, at least, on the balance of probabilities (i.e. more likely than not), "the vast majority of police turn a blind eye" is correct, just based on this one case.
Define "hero". As has been noted many, many times across HN these past few weeks, "police officer" isn't even among the top 15 most dangerous professions in America. And even then police aren't legally required to do their job[1]. Most police are never called upon to do anything heroic, so we can't say if they are heroes or not.
This type of blind veneration for police is weird and unhealthy. If you tell a child, or even an adult, they are great and perfect just for who they are, they're going to turn out spoiled rotten. Why do you think this is any different?
Police are regular people. Some good, some bad, but mostly mixed. The systems they work in allow the bad police to get away with horrific crimes and punish the good police who try to do anything about it.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...
Also, there is a world of difference between professions where accidents are common, and a profession where humans may be actively trying to kill you.
A hero might be a person who knowingly risks life and limb for the safety and wellbeing of others. Even more heroic when those others are strangers (ie it is more heroic to rescue a stranger's child from a house fire than it is to rescue your own child from a house fire). Even more heroic than that is when you do it day in and day out(ie it is more heroic to be a firefigher, saving strangers every day, than it is to save a stranger once).
So, if that is a reasonable analysis of heroism, some police can definitely be heroic. I'm not sure about the percentages though. I'm sure some police got into the profession because they wanted to be a big man with a gun. Others did it because they want to help the community they live in.
> there is a world of difference between professions where accidents are common, and a profession where humans may be actively trying to kill you.
A large fraction of police deaths on the job are traffic accidents.
How does the comparative danger of fields change how dangerous something is? If someone said "Shaq is really tall", would a reasonable response be "No he isn't. Yao Ming is taller"?
> A large fraction of police deaths on the job are traffic accidents.
Yes, that is one way cops die. But this seems decidedly different contextually than the dangers faced by, say, pizza delivery drivers, who also frequently die in car accidents. Presumably, police officers die in car accidents because they are rushing to the scene of a crime or to a place where someone needs help. Pizza delivery drivers die in car accidents commonly because they are rushing to improve the tip they might get, or to be able to deliver more pizzas and get more tips.
If Shaq and Yao played on the same team and Shaq alone started demanding special accommodations due to his height (like extra-large showers or something) that were prohibitively expensive, and refused to play until he got his way, that would be a perfectly valid response. Sound crazy? It's still saner than some people seriously defending cops breaking the law because their job is dangerous. Give me a break.
What makes police injuries and deaths notable from other occupations is that “The most common cause of workplace fatalities among police officers is direct violence from other people”.
It is not just a risky job in general, it is a risky job due to people that would intentionally do them harm, done in service of their community. Everyone is a regular person, but that is why people generally regard police as heroic.
In fact, police are expected to act heroically when the situation calls for it. The Parkland officer who didn’t enter the school during the shooting, caught on tape remaining outside while shots were fired, was rightly condemned as not fit for duty.
[1] - https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/01/08/most-dangero...
But then got his job and pension back with the full backing of his union[1][2]. This is what I mean by the system propping up bad cops. If the "vast majority" of cops are heroes, why are they supporting someone who has demonstrated a distinct lack of heroism? Isn't he making the rest of them look bad? Don't they care?
1. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/05/15/fac...
2. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/broward/art...
I'm sympathetic to people losing their nerve. It's a human reaction and can happen to anyone. But no way should he be allowed to keep his job after he's shown how unfit for it he is.
And the fact that the other cops didn't raise a peep over it tells me that most cops are in fact not heroes. Heroes do the right thing even when it's hard, you see. That's not an insult. I would like a society where policing doesn't have to be heroic. It's just a statement of fact.
Did the chicken or the egg come first?
Were cops the helpless victims of wanton violence before they started brutalizing poor and minority neighborhoods?
Or, has police work gotten more dangerous as police are continually escalating against their desperate communities whom have little left to lose except their lives? Are police fit for duty in America when my barber took a longer training course than an average cop? As the first of first responders police should be competent to deal with any situation. This repo and tens of thousands of incidents going back decades prove, beyond the shadow of adoubt, that police are, on average, incapable of doing what's required of them.
1) Police have dangerous jobs, particularly in the inner city, but by no means are they helpless victims of wanton violence.
2) Police do not brutalize poor and minority neighborhoods. Although the overall trend is that violent crime is going down, these neighborhoods have become significantly less safe and less lawful in just a few weeks of reduced police presence, based on recent crime statistics, particularly shootings and murders, but even simple lawlessness like a 4000% increase in fireworks complaints.
3) Police work has generally gotten safer over the last few decades, for example measured in annual officer deaths which peaked near 300 in the 70s and now hovers around 150. [1]
4) Desperate communities which have little left to lose except their lives — I think this is hyperbolic even to describe inner cities where dozens die every weekend from civilian violence, e.g. Chicago’s bloodiest weekend last week where 85 were shot, 24 fatally. These communities by majority polling support greater police presence and funding, not less.
5) I’d say police academy training is fundamentally different than, for example, trade school apprenticeship. The apprenticeship system essentially has you working the job but under some level of supervision, until you get your license at which point you can work independently. The apprenticeship phase is similar to the supervision that officers receive every day in their squad. The key different is officers have a structured rank and rigid reporting structure, you can’t get a police license and then open up your own police shop. The overall police force performs the same function as the apprenticeship framework in trade crafts. Unlike a licensed electrician/plumber/barber, the officer never gets the opportunity to strike off on their own, but it is true that they enter the force as a low-ranking peon with fewer hours of upfront training than the barber who after their 1,000 hours can open their own unsupervised shop.
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_enforcement_offi...
I'll fight for your right to believe whatever you want. Even when I disagree strongly.
>1) Police have dangerous jobs, particularly in the inner city, but by no means are they helpless victims of wanton violence.
Great. Then what do you call police, who've taken off their body cameras, badges, and name plates: blinding, maiming, and ruthlessly battering people, unprovoked, on camera? If they'd kept their body cameras we could have a much more enlightened discussion.
>2) Police do not brutalize poor and minority neighborhoods. Although the overall trend is that violent crime is going down, these neighborhoods have become significantly less safe and less lawful in just a few weeks of reduced police presence, based on recent crime statistics, particularly shootings and murders, but even simple lawlessness like a 4000% increase in fireworks complaints.
The whole point of a protest is to signal to those being protested against that they are not untouchable. That their lives are not as safe as they'd believe. Burning down precincts is a way of saying we'd rather no police then the thugs masquerading as police in this city. Those statistics are meaningless. The protectors of society have gotten drunk with power and hate. This is the price we all must bear on the path to righting these wrongs. The sooner we all do what it takes to reach compromise the less we will all suffer.
>3) Police work has generally gotten safer over the last few decades, for example measured in annual officer deaths which peaked near 300 in the 70s and now hovers around 150. [1]
So, can we find a way to keep people safe from the police?
>4) Desperate communities which have little left to lose except their lives — I think this is hyperbolic even to describe inner cities where dozens die every weekend from civilian violence, e.g. Chicago’s bloodiest weekend last week where 85 were shot, 24 fatally. These communities by majority polling support greater police presence and funding, not less.
When a community burns down a precinct or creates autonomous zones they are challenging the most basic structures of our society and daring those protested against to show their true colors. How many cops need to get fired for posting horrendous, racist, genocidal, rants publicly before we accept that police nationwide are not fit for duty?
>5) I’d say police academy training is fundamentally different than, for example, trade school apprenticeship. The apprenticeship system essentially has you working the job but under some level of supervision, until you get your license at which point you can work independently. The apprenticeship phase is similar to the supervision that officers receive every day in their squad. The key different is officers have a structured rank and rigid reporting structure, you can’t get a police license and then open up your own police shop. The overall police force performs the same function as the apprenticeship framework in trade crafts. Unlike a licensed electrician/plumber/barber, the officer never gets the opportunity to strike off on their own, but it is true that they enter the force as a low-ranking peon with fewer hours of upfront training than the barber who after their 1,000 hours can open their own unsupervised shop.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/06/04/two-off...
Ironic, no?
edit: Downvote away, but the fact that you can't simply correct the record might be a clue that the distinction between police brutality and "necessary riot control" is not as objective as you suppose it to be.
Citation very much needed.
When reporting police misconduct internally is met with being charged with filing a false report and being kicked off the force, or being committed to an institution until you can talk to someone you trust who can leak a recording to the press, yes it is the vast majority police upholding this system that are not heroes.
When in my city, the only cop to be reprimanded was the one stupid enough to instagram post "let's start a riot", but not the others attacking press and attacking peaceful bystanders, sending the institutional message that brutality is OK but you have to keep your mask on wrt to social media, yes the represent a system of institutional oppression.
They are a tool of social control only interested in the perception of truth, trust and transparency. Pushing whatever narrative serves their interests.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-investiga...
You are not given any of the context of what happened in these situations. If there's video the video starts when the conflict is already full swing, you're not seeing anything that led up to the situation.
You can read "Police showed up and fired tear gas and agitated the crowd and caused violence", but you're not told WHY they fired tear gas. You're not given the context as to what happened.
Not only are you not given the context, but you're only given one side of the story. I'm sure if you asked the police what happened, their story would be completely different. But you're only being allowed to get the story from one side, and that side is insanely politically motivated to exaggerate, and do everything they can to make the police look bad, because it strengths their political positions.
If only there was some sort of recording device that we can put on police officers, and either they can be trusted not to "accidentally" turn it off when an incident occurs or is always-on.
No doubt we have a problem, this is a great start to a collection, but we may want to consider filtering for truth or at least incidents with credible evidence
Do you know of any data sets that don't have bad data?
Or maybe down votes because this is not the comment I thought I attached this too... hmm, let me see if I can at least fix that
I will respect all cops when they earn it. So far I respect only those I interacted with and were well behaved, polite, etc
Any time an arrestee is not fully cooperative with the police taking them into custody, the arrest is not going to be pleasant to watch. Someone is having their freedoms taken from them by force. I don't see an alternative, though.
Here is a scenario:
A person just committed a carjacking using a gun. It happens every day. (There are more than 30,000 carjackings a year in the US, and a bit less than half involved a firearm.)
What non- or less-violent action do you suggest a better trained police officer would take to bring the offender into custody?
Let's say the carjacker didn't have a gun, but instead had beat the driver up. The police spot them, and they run. What next?
Serious question. I have never heard what I consider to be a practical answer to how policing could work in the United States without use of significant force.
There are thousands of practical answers to your question. If you haven't found any of them practical, you're not trying.
Do you have a practical answer for policing without using significant force?
Yeah, that's the job of the justice system. However, they have been failing to do their jobs properly for decades. If they could be trusted to investigate themselves we wouldn't need this list.
Again, sometimes context is important before making assumptions. People will tend to immediately fill in the blanks to fit what they want to be true. And unfortunately more often than not, when receiving new information, they won’t retract anything or reconsider their position.
Is that... is that not exactly, precisely, what we should be expecting from the police side as well? I think that's the entire point, isn't it? At best, their credibility has been called into question. At worst, their credibility has been drug out into the street and kneeled on until it expired.
1) Peaceful protest
2) Police decide that they need to use extreme amounts of force to break up the peaceful protest
3) Unsavory elements use the cover of the ensuing chaos to loot/burn/tag/etc.
1) Peaceful protest
2) Unsavory elements started throwing things at the police
3) The police didn't respond with violence even though clearly attacked and provoked
We have problems with race profiling and other issues but I think the big focus on de-escalation in police training helps a lot to avoid the situation we see in the US.
Even in castle doctrine states, it's only that their unwelcome presence on your property is an implied threat of violence, not that you're legally allowed to commit violence to protect property. That's why booby traps are universally illegal in the US.
So yes, compared to violence and particularly police brutality, it is "just property". Legally.
1) Peaceful protest
2) Police declares protest is over, but people stay.
3) The police respond with violence
We had a problem with the police doing drivebys and firing indiscriminately at crowds as police would drive off.
Google will display pages of results of police lying about what occurred during violent arrests only to be proven wrong by cell phone footage.
Your comment appears as if you may be 'politically motivated to exaggerate'.
How can you tell? Unless you are politically motivated to exaggerate, then all we really know is that there have been some high profile instances where police reports have been falsified. But I don't know how we can reliably expand that to all police reports.
Fundamentally, police officers are sworn, and so their word carries more weight than a non-sworn citizen. This is sensible, but it ought to come with strings attached. Lying, for example, should reliably results in a perjury charge.
I wish we lived in that world. Truth is cops are as fallible as any other human being and for that reason they should either have less power or be at all times in check to ensure they don’t abuse it.
Another point is that protesters feel the police should not be using these amounts of force at all.
I think what this boils down to is that it is evidence of use of force. If this was a courtroom, it would be up to to the defence/prosecution to argue each side, and provide whatever missing context would affect the judge/jurors decision.
Like anything in the 'court of public opinion', it doesn't work like that. Police departments (and city/local governments) are free to put out statements defending their actions as well.
Ideally, the person(s) maintaining this repository would respond to extra gathered evidence/context and remove any links where the context determines something else is happening. That would further strengthen their arguements, as it removes arguments of "well that one doesn't was `justified`, so maybe they all are".
But in general, I have to say that any individual has no responsibility to provide 'both sides' of the argument. The police almost always say their use of force is justified, so they're not the unbiased party either.
When the forces involved go past the point of reason and start being violent for their own sake, it's time to impose restraint from outside.
Police have body cameras and vehicle cameras that can provide much of the rest of the context. The public doesn't have access to that video and the police don't release it save when it reinforces their narrative.
If the police were blameless here, they have lots of tools to clear their name.
So what does this leave us with? A story designed to inflame. Complicating matters more is that the couple were actually big donators to BLM and the DNC, which adds more layers to the narrative, but of course this isn’t mentioned and we are meant to assume they are Trump voters (even though that doesn’t make a difference legally, it makes a difference narratively)
EDIT: and the happy-go-lucky censors downvote into oblivion, proving my point.
I’ve seen no evidence of guns from the protestors, just the racist Karen and Ken.
https://twitter.com/averyrisch/status/1277398535973949440
So no, not a "standoff". Such behavior is certainly sufficient grounds to dismiss any claims of self-defense - lethal force is justified in self-defense when a reasonable person would perceive a threat of imminent death or significant bodily harm; but if you believe something to be a source of such a grave threat, why would you run at it?
There's significant documentary evidence of the incident on video, starting ~27:50: https://www.facebook.com/derk.brown.5/videos/154551737227670...
There's also some dispute about the legal disposition of the property on which protesters may have been protesting, but at worst it appears to be a private street. Just because it is a private property doesn't mean it was their private property, to defend with threats of lethal violence. Being a member of the HOA and paying your dues doesn't give legal title to treat property as your own.
https://www.facebook.com/kim.mason.716/posts/102190071407824...
And then, of course, that gate isn't destroyed in any of the videos from the scene. There are photos showing a destroyed gate - which looks identical - so it clearly was destroyed at some point. But the relevant question is whether that already happened before the confrontation, and it doesn't look like it did.
As for the guy's claim that he is a BLM supporter - you can judge the veracity of that for yourself, based on this:
https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...
(and then, perhaps, derive a heuristic to judge his other claims)
Is it true though? I saw police actions that looked bad on video, but having been on the scene earlier that day I knew the context that cast it in a very different light. And yet no counter-evidence was published. They did not clear their name, despite being in the right (or much more right than the video shown).
Witness accounts: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/gwa2ub/seattle_pol...
I was there earlier and I saw a scared resident trying to drive home through that gate. A protester right next to me made a snide remark about the "expensive" car and proposed blocking the gate. The gate was not blocked that time, but given the video they did it later for some other vehicle.
Two things I conclude from this:
1. The police do not necessarily publish exculpating evidence for their own actions.
2. You wouldn't know what happened if you were not there.
This latter point I cannot emphasize enough - I was there often and last Thursday I realized that one can make/edit enough material to support any point of view.
Their actions police here are openly antagonistic, even with the context you've given.
I can't hear what the police are saying to the protesters, can you?
That's context.
The police actions appear mildly questionable, I'll give you that. But we lack context to understand what happened here.
The problem here is that both sides are defensive of themselves. This is precisely why understanding context and nuance is important, because each is incentivized to favor their own viewpoint.
Context which justifies the police's actions.
Yes, they do have a lot of tools to clear their name. We've seen quite a few occasions where various departments have provided body-cam or dash cam footage showing that force was indeed justified. Generally speaking when they have provided that footage, it's muted the reactions to specific events.
> I saw police actions that looked bad on video
You'd have to ask the respective agencies why they haven't shared any body-cam footage which might exonerate them.
Oh, it's you again. I remember you from the previous thread where you said similar things in the face of piles of evidence. Hi. Here's a post. Not for you, because you don't read or respond to evidence in good faith, but maybe for someone else...
Here are two full-length filled-with-context videos of the police fucking up a crowd of people in Seattle without provocation.
First is an aerial view of Seattle PD spraying, bombing, and gassing a crowd of peaceful protesters with zero provocation. It starts with one cop trying to steal (theft) a protester's pink umbrella (destroying their private property in the process. whoops, I wonder who will pay for that?) and then the cops next to him start pepper spraying the crowd that was literally just standing still chanting. Then they shoot explosives into the crowd. Then they shoot gas.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/gv0ru3/this_is_the...
Not sure what you saw? You saw a cop attempt to rob a protester resulting in the destruction of their private property. Then you saw a person trying to hold onto their property as they're pulled over the fence because a cop just assaulted them. Then you saw the police immediately start spraying and bombing and gassing, with the flimsiest excuse, an entire crowd of people for the horrendous crime of peaceful assembly.
Second is the same scene up close and personal. The action begins at 26:30 where the person filming explains how to recognize that the police planned to initiate violence from the start.
https://www.facebook.com/omarisal/videos/10220021035848747/?...
Again, this isn't for you, because you don't faithfully read responses or watch the videos. But who knows, maybe someone else does.
Less snidely, it seems like these cries for 'we need more context!' stretch further and further into absurdity. The example of police assaulting the old man give us all of the context we need, but people attempt to justify it by taking victim blaming behavior to the extreme.
The police have all the tools they need to dispel these stories. Conveniently, they seem to turn them off when the story doesn't go in their favor. And even with context, none of it justifies the police's behavior.
https://youtu.be/8kCrTvlcgD4?t=57 https://youtu.be/-BGyTi-KdKc?t=33
I think its pretty weird that you justify police violence that is permanently disabling people. I'm sure serial killers and mafia bosses can come up with good reasons why they kill people and if you were in their shoes you would act in exactly the same way but why on earth would accept their behavior? Just because you know why someone did something doesn't mean that the thing they did is okay.
If you think I'm cherry picking. I've seen dozens of videos like these since June where the police was intentionally trying to cause more damage than necessary. At least 4 headshots with rubber projectiles like the video I linked. One of the victims was a man in a wheelchair or a girl going shopping unaware of the riots. Cops standing 2m away throw burning CS gas canisters in your face. At least two elderly men pushed to the ground and one of them bleeding from his ear (most likely skull damage). Sure the man got a bit too close but once he was helplessly lying on the ground the police just walked away as if nothing happened instead of calling an ambulance. There are too many examples to list and I'm sure lots of them didn't even get recorded so we will never know how many there are.
You’re essentially describing eyewitness testimony, right? It should be at least as credible in the court of public opinion as it is in a court of law.
Moore's law is on the side of the protesters here, this information can spread easily because it does not require much bandwidth (without video) for anyone to `git pull remote` this whole repository.
I hope that helps explain why some people have downvoted you without explanation (for the record, I did not).
neither incident appear in this data set.
I will watch this repository, but I think it will be another showman piece which will join the many other repositories that are forgotten about and left to go stale on Github.
Why? Well if you look at some of the contributors, they all have new accounts generated around June, and some have a history of creating fad'ish repositories, probably to massage their ego online.
This repository has some good content but also a lot of "weak" to "non-existent" examples.
We want the systems that enable this brutality changed.
This is like saying "Facebook does some good things so let's ignore the systematic problems it causes" or "Facebook is staffed by people so we have to accept an amount of them stalking their exes with internal tools"
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/us/buffalo-police-shove-p... "Fifty-seven officers resigned from the department’s Emergency Response Team in solidarity with the two who were suspended." [2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8436929/Atlanta-cop... [3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/13/us/why-police-rally-around-ea...
edit: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22police%20admit%20to%22
170,000 results
Though it doesn't give a number of results explicitly there are still several pages of results (though they'd need to be deduped)
As I saw with my own eyes occurring.
Yes there is such a thing in Seattle. See https://library.municode.com/wa/seattle/codes/municipal_code...
Should this give police authority to use violent force to retaliate? (E.g. pepper spray, rubber bullets, fists, etc)
In my opinion, no. I realize that legally, police are protected in these scenarios. Hell, most folks understand that. That’s what people are protesting for: they want the legal system to change.
As a society, I think we morally accept using force in self defense (for example, using pepper spray on an assaulter). We accept it even if someone’s life isn’t actually in danger. Should we accept the same from police? I doubt it. We should hold the protectors of the law to higher standards than common citizens, right? I myself might not fully understand the law and will be acting on my emotional response if I use force in self defense. But police officers should have the training to understand much better when lives are actually in danger. They should have techniques to handle situations like this without violence.
These videos show that whether or not the police were acting out of self defense or within the boundaries of the law, they are still using serious force on unarmed citizens. This is not ok whether or not the citizens are in the right.
The root of the problem is the police force. Even if people are acting in a aggressive, rebellious way against police, they are doing so because of decades of improper use of police force. If we want to change the situation, people must feel safe around police. It’s not just “were police legally right,” it’s “do people feel safe in their own communities.” Clearly not, and we must make changes to help people feel safe. To aid with that, police should be much less powerful, since abuse stems from power.
We should all get behind these changes because police brutality is dangerous to everyone, and especially dangerous to minority communities.