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Comment by boopmaster | Hacker News Reader

This is because Black Lives Matter™, and because black lives matter. This isn’t a hyper escalation against freedom of the press, per se, it’s an escalation of police on citizen violence that came about when police felt threatened when folks got a little extra vocal about how the racist cops boys club has little to no accountability when harming citizens they’re supposed to protect. I think this narrowly focuses on transgressions against journos. What the YoY stonks increase on Americans shot by rubber bullets?

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There's a strong argument to be made for police accountability and conduct. But this post seems to complete ignore the actions of demonstrators and the journalists (often self-proclaimed and self-employed) embedded within them. Look at the disparity between Portland and Minneapolis with respect to the rest of the country: New York has 20 times the population yet only half the journalist arrests. Portland has the same number of journalist arrests and New York but only 1/12th the population. These are order-of-magnitude differences, in cities that happened to have widespread rioting.

And from a more firsthand perspective, I can say that in my hometown of the Seattle metro I never had witnessed the same level of chaos. Armed demonstrators cordoned off a several blocks of the city and declared it off limits to police, and successfully did so for almost a month. Thus is something I have never witnessed before. Nor have I ever witnessed widespread looting outside of Seattle. I live in Bellevue and stores across the street from single family homes were being looted. I saw people walking out of Bellevue Square mall with stolen stuff in broad daylight as though it was completely normal. Neither of these were things I witnessed during the Michael Brown protests or other demonstrations against police conduct.

Both the data and my lived experiences indicate a correlation between more extreme behavior among protestors and more arrests. If we could point to demonstrable differences in the criteria police use for arrests you may have a point. But presently I see little reason to conclude that the disparity in arrests in 2020 are due to policing changes rather than the behavior of demonstrators.

I don't have any memory in my lifetime of a credentialed CNN reporter being arrested live on air in front of his camera crew on US soil until this year.

I think it is rare that the singular instance of misbehavior is caught on live video feed.

I would have to assume that there were many, many similar cases that weren't captured on live cable news.

> Both the data and my lived experiences indicate a correlation between more extreme behavior among protestors and more arrests.

I think there's a false attribution of 'extreme behavior' with 'protestors' primarily. feel there are a significant number of people who took advantage of the protests to loot and burn and generally cause chaos. It's worth noting that Seattle and Portland, are primarily Caucasian (67% taken from OPCD), (77% taken from US Census Data) respectively. I think the looting can be more attributed to a general anarchy/countercultural movement in the PNW as opposed to protestors regarding BLM. It's definitely something that is more complex and requires more research than an off-the-cuff comment could generate.

This thread seems to be triggering rate limiting.

I'm sure plenty of people protested peacefully. But how is that relevant? Regardless of the extent of the overlap between people protesting and people rioting, an increase of the latter is bound to lead to more arrests even if the police's thresholds for making an arrest remain exactly the same.

The fact that there were more looters and rioters in the Pacific Northwest because of "general anarchy" is supportive of my claim, if anything: There were more arrests in Portland not because police became more oppressive, it was because there were more looters and rioters.

I think this comment is dangerous as it legitimises the (clearly documented) widespread arrests of openly marked journalists behaving entirely non aggressively, almost surely because they were pointing cameras at police officers behaving violently. Whether or not you think that the police violence was justified (disclaimer: I don't, at all. I think the psuedo military tactics US police demonstrated were the opposite of sensible de escalation strategy) I'd be surprised if you think that police should have the power to decide whether or not they are filmed.

> I think this comment is dangerous as it legitimises the (clearly documented) widespread arrests of openly marked journalists behaving entirely non aggressively, almost surely because they were pointing cameras at police officers behaving violently.

I have yet to see an instance of journalists being arrested for filming.

What I have seen are crowds of people refusing to abide by curfews or dispersal orders and getting arrested - journalists are sometimes among them. Each time I see a video of a journalist supposedly being arrested for filming, I also see a bunch of people in the background who aren't filming also being arrested.

Anyone can don a jersey that says "press, or a lanyard claiming to be a journalist. The more widespread the notion that these things somehow exempt people from curfews and orders to disperse, the less surprised I am that so many journalists (most of them independent) are getting arrested.

So because you witnessed a riot for the first time, and it wasn't in one of THOSE neighborhoods, we should ignore these statistics and assume there is no problem with police arresting journalists at an elevated rate?

We literally saw a CNN news crew arrested live on air, something completely unprecedented.

The majority of BLM protests have been peaceful[0].

I'll just come out and say it: You are not arguing in good faith. You have 0 interest in considering the merits of the police accountability movement. You trying to discredit the movement by pointing to the minority of opportunists who have sprung up.

0: https://time.com/5886348/report-peaceful-protests/

This thread is triggering rate limiting:

> I'll just come out and say it: You are not arguing in good faith. You have 0 interest in considering the merits of the police accountability movement. You trying to discredit the movement by pointing to the minority of opportunists who have sprung up.

No, the people who protest in a productive and lawful manner I genuinely support. They are the victims of opportunists who riot, and make it so that the former cannot peacefully assemble. When a protest turns into a riot, and a curfew or dispersal order is issued it is the opportunists and rioters who deprived the legitimate protestors of their opportunity to speak. That is part of why it's so important to detain and charge rioters: it's not just the direct harm of violence, it's also the indirect harm of inhibiting peaceful demonstration.

But back to the original point, referencing a sharp increase in arrests while ignoring a sharp increase in riots is just willful ignorance. That's really what it is. What were the biggest riots we had in 2019? In 2018? Were they even remotely as big as the summer 2020 riots?

Same thing in Portland. These are anarchist criminals who should not be tolerated, not protesters. And fake press creds are a running joke.

At 11:30p.m., some individuals lit two fires on the north side of the building, including the awning over the main entrance. Again, warnings were issued via loudspeaker that the incident was a riot and that all persons must leave immediately to the south and east, and if they did not they were subject to arrest, citation, and the use of crowd control munitions including, but not limited to, tear gas and impact weapons. Officers had to quickly move in to put out the fires before they could spread. More arrests were made. During at least one arrest, officers had a crowd surround them and hit them with umbrellas and other objects. They were able to pull an arrested individual away.

As officers tried to disengage again, people with "press" printed on their outer clothing were seen throwing rocks at them. A rock struck the windshield of their transport vehicle, cracking the glass (photo).

> I think this narrowly focuses on transgressions against journos.

While the police are (in theory) subject to the same laws as everyone else that ban assault and battery, they are approximately never enforced against cops, and the US constitution doesn't say anything specifically about the right to not get beat up by the police (although that right certainly exists).

It does say that there are to be no laws abridging the freedom of the press. Additionally, press freedoms are really important, as a properly functioning free press allows people who might not get beat up by the police access to the knowledge that the police are breaking the law and beating people. People don't seem to like it when authority figures act hypocritically, so this is a great tool for exposing their crimes and perhaps causing something to be done about it.

From a consequentialist point of view, it's worse when the police beat journalists than people who aren't documenting cop crimes, because preventing press from publishing about criminal behavior by police increases the likelihood that they will go unpunished.

If we have limited resources to fight them, we should protect those who can accomplish the most in fighting this longstanding police culture of violence, racism, and lies by exposing it for the shameful, dishonorable practice that it is.

>What the YoY stonks increase on Americans shot by rubber bullets?

What is a YoY stonk

It is a year-over-year stock, as typed on r/wallstreetbets.

This interaction demonstrates the risk of taking Reddit slang out of its native context.

I assume YoY is the year over year increase. Stonk mystifies me too, maybe some typo?

Update: stonk=slang for bombardment, according to a quick google.

stonk = stock in memespeak

stonks = stocks in internet slang. Mostly via r/wallstreetbets

"YoY" is "year over year" in finance terms, it just some comparison of data from one year to data from the previous year.

"Stonks" is an intentional misspelling of "stocks" which is a meme word used humorously (like "pwn") and it implies that the speaker doesn't understand financial markets

Why would you assume that cops are racist? Especially when a lot of them are black themselves?

This comment is much more inflammatory than it needs to be.

What do you mean? Parent comment was inflammatory by slandering anyone who works in an entire profession with no basis. Asking him why is not inflammatory.

Because we have looked at the statistics.

Which statistics?

Which statistics are these, please provide! They must be both very detailed and very massaged to get a result as generic as "cops are racist" (a mindset that requires significantly more information than provided by mere statistics to identify).

Here's one pretty interesting result: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200507094621.h...

> The largest-ever study of alleged racial profiling during traffic stops has found that blacks, who are pulled over more frequently than whites by day, are much less likely to be stopped after sunset, when "a veil of darkness" masks their race.

> The Stanford team decided to repeat the analysis using the much larger dataset that they had gathered. First, they narrowed the range of variables they had to analyze by choosing a specific time of day -- around 7 p.m. -- when the probable causes for a stop were more or less constant. Next, they took advantage of the fact that, in the months before and after daylight saving time each year, the sky gets a little darker or lighter, day by day. Because they had such a massive database, the researchers were able to find 113,000 traffic stops, from all of the locations in their database, that occurred on those days, before or after clocks sprang forward or fell back, when the sky was growing darker or lighter at around 7 p.m. local time.

whenever this comes up, this is inevitably the response, which sometimes betrays confirmation bias. these statistics are not hard to find.

This is worth a read for a nuanced, holistic look at the stats.

https://samharris.org/can-pull-back-brink/

Lol, from that very article:

> Specifically, in New York City, in encounters where white and black citizens were matched for other characteristics, they found that:

> Cops were…

> 17 percent more likely to go hands on black suspects

> 18 percent more likely to push them into a wall

> 16 percent more likely to put them in handcuffs (in a situation in which they aren’t arrested)

> 18 percent more likely to push them to the ground

> 25 percent more likely to use pepper spray or a baton

> 19 percent more likely to draw their guns

> 24 percent more likely to point a gun at them.

Some people seem to physically resist arrest more than others. That's really not a smart thing to do, and leads to related stats like that.

If you're so keen on implying it, wouldn't it be more honest to phrase your sentence accurately?

> Black people seem to physically resist arrest more than others. That's really not a smart thing to do, and leads to related stats like that.

For what it’s worth to anyone who finds themselves reading this for whatever reason; the author of the above comment changed their original post from a snarky “have you?” To its current form after my reply.

In my opinion that is not the behavior of someone who is trying to have a good faith discussion.

PNAS has also looked at the statistics:

https://www.pnas.org/content/116/32/15877

Police brutality is definitely a problem in the United States, but it appears to be entirely colorblind.

"This article has a Correction, but has also been retracted and Letters."

From that retraction:

> Despite this correction, our work has continued to be cited as providing support for the idea that there are no racial biases in fatal shootings, or policing in general. To be clear, our work does not speak to these issues and should not be used to support such statements. We take full responsibility for not being careful enough with the inferences made in our original report, as this directly led to the misunderstanding of our research.

edit: It's also, IMO, misleading to claim "PNAS has also looked at the statistics" based on their publication of a submitted article. It passed peer-review and they saw fit to publish it; it doesn't mean the National Academy of Sciences feels it's the last or only word on the subject.

The error is pretty trivial:

>“Although we were clear about the quantity we estimated and provide justification for calculating Pr(race|shot, X) in our report (see also 2, 3), we want to correct a sentence in our significance statement that has been quoted by others stating ‘White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers.’ This sentence refers to estimating Pr(shot|race, X). As we estimated Pr(race|shot, X), this sentence should read: ‘As the proportion of White officers in a fatal officer-involved shooting increased, a person fatally shot was not more likely to be of a racial minority.’ This is consistent with our framing of the results in the abstract and main text.

The retraction comes after the correction, and again, states explicitly:

> our work does not speak to these issues and should not be used to support such statements

This sounds exactly like a common complaint about academic self-censorship, in which academics are terrified about saying anything that might contradict the politically correct consensus.

Barring any odd discrepancies with the data, it it seems clear to me here at least. White officers and non-white officers don't seem to shoot blacks and hispanics at different rates. Hiding behind "does not speak of these issues" seems like a cop out when the conclusion slaps you in the face.

Evidently you either have not, or you have made some fairly basic errors in interpreting the data.

I took it to mean that the "cop's boys club" is racist, not all cops.

But if you want to see real world examples of racism in policing, talk to a handful of Black men and ask about their experiences dealing with the cops. You will very likely hear many stories that you have never heard of happening to white people.

And the individual cops don't have to be racist for the -system- of policing to be racist.

That’s backwards. The “system” quite obviously has no racial element. It’s possible (but uncommon) for racist individuals to get jobs as officers, but absolutely nothing about “the system” itself is racist.

Of course systems can have a racial element. How could a system that originated to catch runaway slaves -not- have a racial element?

Because systems are designed by individuals. If you put a bunch of not-racist police officers patrolling the Black part of town all day, guess what? They are going to arrest more Black people than white people even if white people are committing just as many crimes.

If your system has "stop and frisk" laws, then you are going to be stopping and frisking people who are walking and ignoring most everyone else that drives or takes a taxi (i.e. people with money and white, on average).

If your system rewards citations and arrests, then cops are going to tend towards neighborhoods where they can find more people out and about, i.e. urban centers, where people of color live and population is more dense. You aren't going to get many citations in the white suburbs where everyone gets in their cars to go anywhere and the population is all spread out.

When a journalist steps beyond being a journalist and turns into an activist, of course they’re going to get arrested if they break the law. Just because someone is a journalist does not give them a pass from breaking the law.

> Just because someone is a journalist does not give them a pass from breaking the law.

I’m entirely on the side of real journalism so it was interacting to see some people that thought a press badge meant they didn’t need to also follow police orders.

Not following police order is grounds for arrest, not for getting a riot shield bashed into one's face.

I don't know about the US, but here in Canada not following police orders is not by itself grounds for arrest. It has to be a lawful order, not whatever the police fancies at the moment. The police cannot for example say "stop filming or I will arrest you" and be able to legally justify that arrest in the court of law.

https://globalnews.ca/news/6233399/supreme-court-montreal-es...

It's not, which is why you see people arrested this way getting released without charges.

It's an intimidation tactic, and the officers face zero consequences for employing it. "You may beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride" and all that.

Toronto police did very similar things during the 2010 G20 Toronto summit protests. Then chief of Toronto Police is now a cabinet minister. I don't want to insinuate that this kind of behaviour does not happen in Canada. It certainly does, but it doesn't make it right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX0BbLc_PIk

It was a dispersal order to leave a riot so the crowd can be controlled, not an order to stop filming. There’s no other legal and humane way to deal with rioters amongst a crowd. Even if you aren’t being violent or breaking anything, you have to leave when told to do so.

Let me copy my comment here too - sorry for the spam.

"In the video the police had control. There was absolutely zero need to escalate. They were trying to punish and intimidate the crowd instead of trying to disperse or control it. That should cost the commanding officer's job."

The professional way is to identify the instigators/leaders in the crowd and extract them one by one. Also to constantly move the crowd street by street - toward less narrow places.

> You have to leave when told to do so.

And if you don't they might arrest you. Standing there is no cause for smashing faces. They can simply grab the closest persons to the police line, bring them behind the line, arrest them. No need to lash out. This gets the message across. If the crowd starts to escalate, sure, water jets. But even that's usually completely unnecessary. Just pick up the trouble makers one-by-one, usually that means less than a dozen people.

Because if there really is an organized fanatical crowd then the police would likely withdraw, like they did in Seattle "zone".

Same in the US.

But, people are required to obey police commands, unlawful or not, and then seek remedy from the courts afterwards.

And, there is usually a narrow self-defense exception. One can lawfully resist if the police are unlawfully trying to kill you.

In the video the police had control. There was absolutely zero need to escalate. They were trying to punish and intimidate the crowd instead of trying to disperse or control it. That should cost the commanding officer's job.

Can officer give some absurd order just as cause to arrest someone?

Generally, yes. Victims of this tactic are required to obey the absurd orders and then seek remedy from the courts afterward.

There are exceptions related to orders to break the law, put oneself or others into danger, and so on.

For example, if you resist arrest, the underlying charge may get dropped for lack of evidence but the resisting arrest charges may remain. Though, the resisting arrest charges (or obstruction charges) may get dropped too depending on the prosecuting agency's policies.

It depends on the police order.

Order someone to step to the side for public safety? Probably alright. Probably. Unless it's obvious that what they really mean is "Step so you can't see what I'm about to do."

Order someone to stop filming? Spot-check your First Amendment training and get back to me. Or give that order again, on camera.

Breaking the law like filming police violence for example:

https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2020/05/29/minneapolis-protest...

Watch the video and tell me how that arrest was justified.

What was the person filming arrested for? I know many in Seattle were arrested for violating curfews or dispersal orders, and proceeded to claim that they were arrested for filming. They weren't arrested for filming, they were arrested because they harbored ill-conceived views that declaring oneself a journalist exempted them from curfews and orders to disperse and proceeded to violate them.

> Jimenez could be seen holding his CNN badge while reporting, identifying himself as a reporter, and telling the officers the crew would move wherever officers needed them to. An officer gripped his arm as Jimenez talked, then put him in handcuffs.

> Police told the crew they were being detained because they were told to move and didn't, one member of the CNN crew relayed to the network.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/29/us/minneapolis-cnn-crew-arres...

If you can simply not imagine the police arresting someone for no reason, or for challenging their unlawful assertion of authority, or so they can beat up protesters more effectively away from the watchful eyes of the press, no amount of evidence is going to convince you otherwise. But please, consider that police misbehaviour is at the very least a possibility.

> Police told the crew they were being detained because they were told to move and didn't, one member of the CNN crew relayed to the network.

Right, they were violating an order to disperse or a curfew. Again, being a journalist doesn't bestow some special rights that lets you ignore the police when they issue an order to disperse or set a curfew. When people are looting and burning stuff down, the law has provisions to let the police say "this is out of hand, the only way we have to restore peace is to tell everyone to get out of the area". And when people ignore those orders they're violating the law and subject to arrest. And so are CNN's journalists. Being a journalist doesn't bestow any special rights.

You can disagree with whether it was appropriate to order people disperse in this situation. But what is certain is that your previous comment was spreading falsehood: they weren't arrested for filming police, they were arrested for ignoring an order to disperse or a curfew. I'd come off as a lot less deceptive if you were transparent about the real reason for the arrest in your previous comment. It's 40 minutes old at the time of my writing this so you have at least an hour to edit it.

Why are you ready to take police's words at face value, while completely dismissing the hard video evidence that directly contradicts it? This is giving me serious 1984 vibes.

This thread seems to be triggering rate limiting:

What "hard evidence" contradicts it? Can you provide evidence that no such dispersal order was given? Or that they were arrested prior to such order, or curfew?

In fact the source you posted doesn't even claim that they were arrested for filming. This idea that the reporter was arrested for filming seems to be entirely your own.

Your question isn't, "Why am I ready to take police's words at face value?" The question you're really asking is "why aren't I ready to take an anonymous internet commenter's claims at face value?"

The video is the evidence. If you don't accept it as evidence, perhaps the fact that the governor of Minnesota apologized for it should hint that the arrest was not justified. If you don't consider any evidence, except police's words, to be evidence, I have nothing to add.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/03/politics/tim-walz-apology-oma...

Nowhere in the interview you linked to did the Minnesota governor say that the journalist was arrested for filming, either.

The CNN journalist was far from the only person arrested. If the cops were arresting people for filming, not for violating dispersal orders, why were so many other people in the area who weren't filming being arrested? Why do you insist on claiming that they were arrested for filming, when CNN's own article doesn't make this claim?

There was no causal link between filming and this man's arrest. The police ordered a crowd to disperse, and the crowd didn't. Members of the crowd did not disperse, and were arrested. A journalist was among said members that did not disperse and were arrested. He would have been arrested whether or not he was filming.

The debate is whether the arrest was lawful or unlawful. What unlawful purpose did the police had in mind when they arrested the journalists is of very little effect and does not warrant a discussion. If you want to prove the arrest was lawful, bring on evidence. For example, that the journalist was charged and convicted of a crime in relation to the arrest made here later. If there are no charges and convictions, and I cannot emphasize it enough because you seem to ignore it no matter how many times I say it, the video strongly suggests and I daresay even proves the arrest was made for not legitimate reason, and the governor apologized for it, I cannot see how you can argue in good faith that the arrest was lawful.

> What unlawful purpose did the police had in mind when they arrested the journalists is of very little effect and does not warrant a discussion.

Then please edit the comment to which I originally responded to correctly state that they were arrested for violating an order to disperse.

If it's of such little effect then surely you would be fine with making this modest change, correct?

Yes, well, of course, indubitably, those pesky activists with press passes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pti6ZiH7dQ

The age old crime of filming crime.

This argument would be valid if the arrested journalists were in fact breaking the law, but it's not the case - the vast majority of the arrests ended up with prosecutors declining to press charges as the detainees were not breaking any laws. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/us/protests-lawsuits-arre... has some overview, of course the actual pdf linked in the original article has more detail as well.

How many of the arrested journalists "stepped beyond" their duty?

It appears that the police harmed journalists during the journalists' regular course of duty: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/05/31/journa...

The implicit assumption here is that those journalists who got arrested did so because they broke the law, not because of misbehaviour on the part of the police.

There seems to be at least enough evidence of the plausibility of the latter that the assumption is far too strong to offer without evidence.

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