Make Him a Suspect: Rochester PD's Response to Killing of an Unarmed Black Man | Hacker News Reader

Make Him a Suspect: Rochester PD's Response to Killing of an Unarmed Black Man

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117 pointsclockworksoul28 comments

LMPD tried to do this exact thing with Breonna Taylor by offering her ex-boyfriend a plea deal to implicate her in drug activity[0]

0: https://www.wdrb.com/news/wdrb-video/drug-suspect-offered-ju...

Bodycam of the incident is available [1].

Linking as a footnote because it's NSFW and hard to watch. They basically crush the life out this guy then joke as he lays naked and dead in the street.

[1] https://youtu.be/EHpCrmrCtn8

The only thing more dangerous than these bullies is the system that takes incompetent thugs and trusts them with the most vulnerable people in our society.

I'm ashamed that this is still how we treat people under the influence of drugs or mental health crises in 2020. Thanks for posting the footage, I'm disgusted.

It make absolutely no sense that these armed morons with badges are even touching this naked, handcuffed, and head-bagged man - let alone murdering him.

Smearing the victim is SOP for cops. https://fair.org/home/6-elements-of-police-spin-an-object-le...

One would be tempted to extrapolate from the article title that it's disproportionately used against blacks. Since otherwise it wouldn't specifically point out the victim was black, just as stories of police shootings rarely point out in the title if the victim was white.

> Writers are told to avoid usage of the passive voice.” A rationalist whose background comes exclusively from science may fail to see the flaw in the previous sentence; but anyone who’s done a little writing should see it right away. I wrote the sentence in the passive voice, without telling you who tells authors to avoid passive voice. Passive voice removes the actor, leaving only the acted-upon. “Unreliable elements were subjected to an alternative justice process”—subjected by whom? What does an “alternative justice process” do? With enough static noun phrases, you can keep anything unpleasant from actually happening.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Lz64L3yJEtYGkzMzu/rationalit...

Excuse my ignorance here.

How many police -> suspect interactions are there every day in all 50 US states? What percentage of them are this level of bad/corrupt yearly? Like, 0.2%? I'm not saying it's ok but... I'm pretty sure every business/sector has extremely gross behavior that if we knew about it, we'd be turned off morally. I don't get why hating cops in America is so "trendy" when statistically speaking, there's no way the majority of cops (or anywhere close to it) deserve the hate/flak they get.

In the famous words of Chris Rock

>Some jobs, everybody gotta be good. Like … pilots. Ya know, American Airlines can’t be like, 'Most of our pilots like to land. We just got a few bad apples that like to crash into mountains. Please bear with us.'"

It’s not just the “Few Bad Apples” it’s the entire system where the “Blue Wall” protects them and the justice system doesn’t prosecute. Police rarely blow the whistle on bad actors. That means all of the cops that protect their own deserve all of the flak they get.

As always, I have to point out - as we know it today, the phrase is "one bad apple spoils the bunch". In it's original form, "a rotten apple quickly infects its neighbor". (Ethyl outgassing from over-ripe apples will encourage other apples to ripen too fast, and mould will spread from one to the next.) The idea has never been that we should tolerate the odd ones out, but that they need to be removed to stop the spread.

There's nothing wrong with describing such officers at bad apples. There's something wrong with leaving where they are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_apples

I think of this Chris Rock line whenever I think of "bad apples"

I agree, it's a small percentage. But if we are looking at the percentage of cops willing to lie to protect a bad cop or willing to look the other way when a bad cop does something bad, I'm afraid the percentage is way higher than 0.2%.

In only the past few months: Rochester PD showed up in hoards outside of the courthouse where their fellow officers were being charged for shoving a frail old man to the ground on video.

The reason they showed up was to support the officers that hurt the old man. They cheered them on as the left the courthouse. There's clearly a culture problem that needs to be addressed here.

[1] https://triblive.com/news/world/buffalo-protester-pushed-by-...

Cool whataboutism.

Anyway, the majority of cops are complicit and circle the wagons whenever a bad cop gets outed. When they start defending the public instead of their friends then you can use the phrase "good cop", otherwise all cops are bad cops.

Hilarious that this was flagged. It's a shame how many Americans see facts they don't like and try to respond with censorship.

I wish there was a word like "cowardice" except with 10x the magnitude.

It seems like the unfortunate reality of having a flag button and just giving everyone the ability to use it is that only the content that least offends people's political sensibilities makes it to the front page. If it makes people uncomfortable (such as the realities of police abuse in America) then it gets flagged off the first page.

I worry that it makes HN a bit of a bubble where the people who are made uncomfortable by certain truths and need to hear them the most are also the least likely to hear them because they will flag them away. You can kind of have an entire alternative reality here where police abuse doesn't exist and the police do face accountability for their actions. I wish there was a way to fix it.

I'm not one of the flaggers, but it's questionable that this falls under the umbrella (per the site guidelines) of "anything that good hackers would find interesting" or "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".

I agree that this is an important article in general, but it's reasonable to hold the opinion that it doesn't belong on HN, and flagging is the way to signal that.

I'm a good hacker and I find this interesting. Also, police (mis)behavior is a common thread on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Couldn't good 'hackers' potentially find opportunities in the shitstorm that is modern policing? Perhaps there's a business or some other way to 'disrupt' policing, and make it more fair/balanced/honest. Can't do that if we fail to have substantive discussions about what the problems are.

> I wish there was a word like "cowardice" except with 10x the magnitude.

"Bootlicker"

The article doesn’t mention it, what consequences do the officers/department or those involved face for creating a fake report and fraudulently denying the FOIA request?

I have to guess not much and that's part of the reason people are angry about how policing is conducted in the USA right now.

A personal anecdote: a friend of mine is a former cop and reported one of his colleagues for lying about an arrest. Not even a week later, he was fired for "not being a team player". From what he said, this type of stuff happens all the time.

Consequences? Brought by the DA? Besides having a very close relationships with their police departments, DA’s have broad discretion in which cases they bring and do not bring.

The largest structural consequence of note was the decision by Philly’s DA Krasner to not call officers whose testimony he knew was questionable, and release those names. He’s not very popular among police

Out of every other modern Nation, why is it that US has such extreme police brutality (bullying)?

Is the #1 reason that there aren’t balance and checks for power? I.e there isn’t effective policing of the police? When was the last time a police officer was put in prison for stepping out of line?

This shouldn't be flagged IMNSHO.

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