Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by _red | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

_red

Does this include the property crimes caused by the protesters? If no, why not?

View on HN

Why would a list of police brutality incidents contain information about property crime?

Because often the way these things escalate is police are called because protesters are burning and looting...

This is my point: The presentation of this list inherently absolves one-side from any misdeeds.

The protestors burning and looting are not sanctioned by the state and funded by taxpayers. We already have laws for punishing them. The whole point of this repo is pointing out that the police are held to a completely different set of standards, and are almost always let off the hook.

It doesn't matter how much burning and looting happened, the police still cannot engage in indiscriminate brutality.

> Because often the way these things escalate is police are called because protesters are burning and looting

I'm sure that might be the case sometimes, but from the multitude of videos I've seen over the past month or so, it's the police that are doing the escalating - preventing people from their lawful right to protest peacefully, storming into peaceful park protests and dragging people out at random, indiscriminately spraying groups of protestors with pepper spray, shooting numerous people in the chest and face with rubber bullets and lead bean-bags (which should only ever be used at legs), shooting people in the head at point-blank range with flash-bang grenades, firing at several journalists and bystanders, drive-by shootings of bystanders and houses, harassing laywers and others that have called them out, a lot of police obscuring their badge numbers and disabling their bodycams ...

Seriously, the sheer quantity of video evidence is absolutely astounding - and it can only be the tip of the iceberg.

That's not been my experience. The police have been the first to escalate in Denver. Then the resulting chaos gives cover for unsavory elements to start tagging/burning/looting.

That would belong in a git repo of property crimes caused by protestors. It’s an entirely different data set.

Please explain why you think property is the same importance as human lives being destroyed by people who were sworn to protect them.

I won't go as far as equating property to human lives, but do remember the vast majority of businesses looted or burned were small, already hurting from Covid-19, and a large number of them black owned. Sure, these people's business owners weren't killed, but everything they worked for during their life is pretty much ruined.

This is something that's repeated very often on news media with zero citations to the datasets from which they derive their conclusions.

Would be interested to see your sources because folks like myself are highly skeptical about unsubstantiated claims, especially when they serve ulterior interests. In this case, small business rhetoric supports mostly the large businesses that want to suppress wages and avoid workplace protection regulations.[1]

[1] https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-111-how-small-bus...

Do you have data supporting the claim that most looted businesses were small?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com