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Comment by TheGrim-888 | Hacker News Reader

Just a reminder that none of this is factual or evidence. It COULD be, but just because somebody writes something doesn't make it true.

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.

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> 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.

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.

I would expect no less from police, however, these days some "news" seems to be taking select information with no context, or out of context, and then using it to push a certain narrative. I think the point being that we should seek the truth (maybe the wrong word here..) no matter what the source.

I recall reading that some localities have already made changes to their body camera recording rules which rule video footage inadmissible if it has been edited to remove context.

I don't buy it. It is unlikely that the rules of evidence are being changed. I could always be wrong, though. Got a source?

Sorry, I was a little unclear in that post and probably made it sound more legal (as in, courtroom) than I intended. What I meant is that some police departments have announced that they will not allow edited or out-of-context footage from body cams by police officers facing administrative action. You're right in that courtroom rules of evidence are not subject to such decrees.

> 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.

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.

In the current environment, I’m not so sure. I was really negative on the St. Louis couple that pulled guns on protesters... until I learned the “peaceful” protesters were on private property and had already destroyed an iron gate and were threatening to burn down their house. None of those latter facts were easily available until I dug deeper into the story. The New York Times story that shows up when I Google mentions none of these facts, most importantly that the protesters, more accurately a rioting mob, were on private property.

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.

A significant number of the "facts" you're citing are under dispute.

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.

That protesters "had already destroyed an iron gate" and "were threatening to burn down their house" are both uncorroborated claims by the person who pointed the gun. Which is fine, but here's another person giving their own testimony that the gate was not destroyed at that point:

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)

If your narrative is correct, then the couple almost certainly would have been served better by documenting the violence and destruction themselves rather than coming off like armed idiots.

i'm not sure that a video camera offers the same line of defense as a firearm when you feel your life is in danger. after all, the incident was a straight up gun standoff with weapons on both sides.

[citation required]

I’ve seen no evidence of guns from the protestors, just the racist Karen and Ken.

The incident involved the armed woman walking towards the crowd while pointing her handgun at them. It's clearer in some recordings made from a different angle, e.g.:

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?

If they feared for their life they wouldn't have acted so relaxed and would have been inside the house, not swinging around outside.

>If the police were blameless here, they have lots of tools to clear their name.

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).

> Is it true though

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.

Can you give context to what you saw?

This incident: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/gwa2ub/seattle_pol...

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.

I mean, I don't see why they're moving the barricades into the protesters when they could move them to the side to let the van through, and explain what they're doing rather than just arresting people out of nowhere.

Their actions police here are openly antagonistic, even with the context you've given.

You just identified exactly what OP was asking for: context.

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.

Mildly questionable and actively stupid. They have a multi lane road and force the one lane with seated protestors open. I am not sure that there is any context that could explain that choice unless the police is actually prohibited from routing traffic around an obstacle.

Excuse me for not being clear.

Context which justifies the police's actions.

I agree that short videos can be misleading. But I think it's wrong to say that we're only allowed to get one side of the story, because some media outlets are focusing heavily on riot/looting/destruction of property (and essentially not covering the protests when they are completely peaceful).

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.

>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.

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.

They had an always on policy and the ACLU sued them because people were afraid that they might be using them for surveillance.

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.

I checked my local city, some of the incidents are true, others lack evidence, others seem to lack a brutality component all together (such as firing a pepper all at the ground in front of someone breaking the law.

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

>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

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.

Before we filter for truth lets train our police force to be less violent because that breads more violence on the other end and we all loose except for the powerheads in charge as well as the real gangsters. Police have no right to be violent, they do get a paycheck for fsake, and they have the law on their side as well.

I will respect all cops when they earn it. So far I respect only those I interacted with and were well behaved, polite, etc

Currently, and historically as far as I know, part of a police officer's job is to hurt people, when certain conditions present themselves. Every day police officers respond to DV assaults that are in progress. Oftentimes the perpetrator fights the police.

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.

I have yet to see a credible explanation for the vast disparity in police violence between the USA and literally every other first world country. Let's take Germany, for example. How is it possible that US police kill more people in half a year than German police have killed since 1952?

There are thousands of practical answers to your question. If you haven't found any of them practical, you're not trying.

That doesn't explain why police violence happens against unarmed and vulnerable people.

Violence against unarmed and vulnerable people is just safer for the police.

"...what I consider to be a practical answer..."

Do you have a practical answer for policing without using significant force?

Any rich part of town is policed without any use of significant force.

No. That's why I asked the question.

I guess people don't like hearing / learning that there are falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims in the data set.

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

Is the opposite not true on every single police report? Only one sided and often that one sided report is shown to be completely unreliable once cell phone video is provided by witnesses. The police report for Breonna Taylor listed no injuries.

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'.

> Is the opposite not true on every single police report?

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.

Of course every police report is one sided, it represents the police officers description of what happened. Its one sided by its very nature. I am not saying they are all false, merely that they are all one sided.

“The cops are always right, have never done wrong, never provoked, have no ego and never powertrip.”

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.

:%s/ or/ and/g

At least in my city, for the protests I attended, this is about the right level of context. The ordering went

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.

In the Swedish BLM protests it was:

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.

In the German BLM protests it was:

1) Peaceful protest

2) Police declares protest is over, but people stay.

3) The police respond with violence

Wonder if it's "just property" when it's your own.

I mean, yeah, it's a common thread in the US legal system as well, that property theft/damage doesn't give you the right to commit violent actions.

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.

Was there a dispersal order given before physical attempts to break up the protest? (I am not opining about its propriety (if it existed); just asking if it happened.)

In some cases, but not in others.

We had a problem with the police doing drivebys and firing indiscriminately at crowds as police would drive off.

I'd like to hear the backstory behind these videos then.

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 may need to re-read his post, he was definitely not justifying anything. It’s surprising that a place like HN tolerates such blatant fallacies. This isn’t how empirical data or statistics works.

"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." -George Orwell

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.

Good point, the police already have avenues to tell their side (the news) and this resource provides the rest of the story. Like all pieces of information, it's good to understand the biases at play before accepting anything as fact.

Entirely aside from the point that the levels of action in many cases are totally unjustified regardless of the context.

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.

> Just a reminder that none of this is factual or evidence. It COULD be, but just because somebody writes something doesn't make it true.

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.

> You are not given any of the context of what happened in these situations...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.

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.

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