Police bodycam footage shows arrest of George Floyd for the first time | Hacker News Reader

Police bodycam footage shows arrest of George Floyd for the first time

dailymail.co.uk

15 pointsToFab1239 comments

Reminds me of the Rodney King videos. An abbreviated version was shown in the press over and over, which looked pretty damning. But, the jury saw the entire thing and acquitted.

> which looked pretty damning. But, the jury saw the entire thing and acquitted.

The Department of Justice disagreed. They indicted the officers for violating King's civil rights, and two of them went to prison for it.

You may be familiar with the Attorney General leading the DoJ at the time, because he's the same one leading it now: Bill Barr.

Twitter is cancer

This will be flagged I'm sure, but the comments on Reddit, which I'd call a mostly pro BLM community are almost all against George Floyd from this video.

I feel like there will be a shift of significance from this. People are commenting their opinions are changed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ActualPublicFreakouts/comments/i34b...

While this does show that this was indeed a difficult case to handle from the police perspective, I don't see how this would make it OK to kneel on someone's neck for a prolonged period of time.

I haven't watched the video because I'm more interested in an unbiased look at how people are reacting to it.

The 330 million Americans view is what interests me.

If I was a Republican I'd quickly relate the "I can't breath" to drug use for instance. There is a good dog whistle there.

HN isn't the community.

"I can't breath" is not at all believable when followed by vigorous non-compliance. Cops are used to criminals saying stuff like "I can't breath" to cause delay and worse. Make it believable with complete compliance, and cops will render aid.

BTW, the autopsy showed drug levels high enough to kill a non-abuser 11 times over, plus another 5 already processed by the body.

Will change anything? Apart from providing a talking point for people who want to deflect from the real issue.

Let's consider this logically.

You imply that this video exonerates the police in some way. In order for this video to exonerate the police, it would have to prove that:

1. Four police officers with guns could not safely arrest an unarmed Floyd.

2. Floyd's respiratory distress (likely caused, as Floyd himself said, by Covid-19) was not affected at all by the officer kneeling on his neck.

Given examples around the country/world of police departments that arrest low-level, non-violent criminals without kneeling on their necks and killing them, it's hard to see how #1 could be true.

If you think that these statements are true, perhaps you could share how this video proves them, rather than trying to justify a very unorthodox claim by citing the collective wisdom of the audience of /r/ActualPublicFreakouts.

> ...Reddit, which I'd call a mostly pro BLM community are almost all against George Floyd from this video.

Reddit is not representative of anything, and /r/ActualPublicFreakouts isn't even representative of Reddit. It's also not at all "pro BLM", based on the all-time top posts[1].

I'm also unclear why it matters whether this video is changing the minds of people who visit /r/ActualPublicFreakouts. I don't know what kind of person enjoys watching videos (mostly) of people in extreme distress, but I'm personally not interested in their collective opinion of law enforcement reform.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/ActualPublicFreakouts/top/?t=all

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