https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/7645474002
“An Arkansas woman says she had no safe place to pull over in July 2020 when a state trooper tried to stop her for speeding, so she turned on her hazard lights and slowed down. Moments later, the officer rammed her vehicle, causing it to flip over and injuring the woman”
Remind us how physical injury is a reasonable response to a traffic violation.
But the way the story was presented was extremely biased. I believe the US cops are trained to actually use the "pit" maneuver to stop offenders who otherwise refuse to stop. In this case, he should've known better - but one can totally see how an asshole cop would interpret the situation as "lady is refusing to stop, I need to compel her to do so".
I guess what I'm saying is that it wasn't a totally random act of unprovoked cop violence.
> An Arkansas woman says she had no safe place to pull over in July 2020
The Arkansas woman was lying. That's it. I was not defending the cop, and never did I claim he was behaving professionally.
Still. The Arkansas woman was lying. She had plenty of safe space to pull over. Seemed relevant to me.
Yes, he did [1].
> If not, wouldn't it be time to change the law?
'The [Arkansas State Police], as part of the settlement agreement, has agreed to change its Use of Force policy as it relates to PIT maneuvers and institute an “objective standard” required to justify the maneuver’s use versus the previous “subjective standard.”'[1].
I would argue that a more across the board set of changes is required.
[1] https://www.kark.com/news/working4you/arkansas-state-police-...
There's a lot that could be improved in our judicial system, but you're not going to identify the areas that need improvement by sharing anecdotes of "Well this one time in Arkansas..."
Your argument might be more valid if these “bad apples” faced appropriate punishment, but they never do.
Does the context this video provides make the officers actions okay? No, I don't think so. Does it make those actions appear much, much more reasonable than it was made out to be on social media? Absolutely.
I understand and appreciate that social media can (and has) exaggerated things, which you've demonstrated, but I don't see how this demonstrates that police brutality is not a problem, or is an exaggerated problem. Ultimately you agree the police officer's actions were not okay.
The Verge article which I referred to originally: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/31/21276044/police-violence-...
For example, there were multiple videos showing police cars literally running into protesters, ramming into groups of them. What additional context could ever make that okay? Under what circumstances would that be a reasonable response?
Or as another example, police use tear gas on protesters, even though it's banned in war.
I've seen videos of protesters surrounding police vehicles trying to destroy them and harm the officer inside. That's a situation where running people over to get away would absolutely be acceptable.
Tear gas is a great way to safely control crowds without firing gunshots. I've been subjected to it myself and while it's not pleasant, no lasting damage results from it.
Stop trying to act like context doesn't matter, it always does and here even more so.
It’s literally banned in warfare. Sorry but this is ridiculous.
No, running people over is never a proper response to violence. They’re policemen. They should disengage. Not plow into literal citizens of the country they’re supposed to be protecting. (Anyway, the videos did not show anyone trying to get inside the car — the protesters were behind barricades. Try watching them.)
Again, you haven’t given any actual evidence this is happening. The single piece of evidence you gave is still a case of clear cut brutality, you admitted it yourself.
Finally, again, even if they are “a few bad apples”, they not get punished. And their supposedly valiant comrades don’t stop them from doing these things. The system is corrupt.
"It's banned in warfare" doesn't make it some egregious WMD. It's banned because all chem weapons are banned per the Geneva convention and adding particular exceptions is a dangerous path to go down. Every single basic trainee in the US Armed Forces is subjected to it and they all turn out just fine (or well, if they don't it's not because of the tear gas exposure). You're using the term as if it's some catch all that ends any and all conversation. Would you like to suggest an alternative to safely controlling dangerous crowds?
> They should disengage
The exact situation I laid out was protestors surrounding an officers vehicle and beating it trying gain access to do him bodily harm. Would you like to suggest how he can disengage? I'd love to hear any ideas you have because driving away is quite literally the safest option there. The alternative is to shoot the people trying to attack him. One most likely results in broken bones where the other most likely results in death. Here's an example in which people swarmed the car that showed up on screen and the officer had to run someone over to escape personal harm. Frankly if protestors surround a vehicle, don't move or clear the way when asked multiple times and given multiple warning, then they 100% deserve to be run over. That's their fault. Don't surround an occupied vehicle in a violent environment and expect nothing to happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bou2MzSGfvs
I didn't say it was "clear cut brutality". I said it probably wasn't okay, but that it's more nuanced than people such as yourself would like to make it appear.
Are you going and holding every single software engineer that writes malware or privacy invading adware responsible? Oh no? Guess that makes you just as bad as them.
Edit: And I should add, nor have you provided evidence to the contrary. How many videos are there of police intentionally ramming into completely peaceful protestors? I'd wager there aren't very many. You're the one claiming that any potentially adverse action taken by a police officer is wrong despite any co-factors or context. Show me a video where the police are running someone over and, with all the context and surrounding information, it still looks absolutely unreasonable.
My dad was a police officer and I grew up around police. It's there's one thing to know about police, it is that they are human, and subject to all the emotions, inconsistencies, and foibles as other humans.
However, they are given an extraordinary amount of power, with very little accountability. Think about what it would take for a regular person (maybe even you) to lose their job. Yet here is an example of an officer, behaving very aggressively, against department policy, causing a major accident and injuring a pregnant woman.
As far as I can tell, he still has his job (although he was "disciplined", and the lawsuit was picked up by the taxpayers).
https://apnews.com/article/lawsuits-arkansas-legal-settlemen...
In this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30987681 you wrote:
> ...There may be 1 in 100 truly awful police men and women out there, just as their are truly awful people in every known profession.
Your complaint about others' anecdotes would hold more weight if you weren't just making up statistics.
That sounds about as useful as the anecdotes in this thread. Police aren't a random sample of the population after all. Even if it's true that most people are good, that doesn't imply most police are.
What I do know is that as of May 2021 there were 665,380 police officer employed in the US, and trying to generalize all of them in any way based on a few highly edited videos is absolutely not a valid approach given the standard practices in data science and statistics. Given that the US generalized crime rate is 47.70 per 100,000 it's reasonable to argue that unless there is evidence showing otherwise, police officers also fit roughly into that same distribution and therefore would be "mostly good" (as defined by law), as most people are.
Then look up the per-capita number of people put in hospitals by U.S. law enforcement officers vs other countries.
Then look up the consequences U.S. law enforcement officers face when they harm or kill. Also look up their relative training.
Finally look up most dangerous professions and see where law enforcement ranks to get an idea of whether their lives are truly in such danger as to justify their actions.
After looking at this data (and I apologize for not providing citations directly but I’m on mobile), it’s hard to avoid forming the opinion that U.S. law enforcement is undertrained, unjustifiably aggressive, protective of bad officers, and unaccountable to the communities it serves.
Anecdotally, I’ve had more than my fair share of interactions with officers and about 20% of them have been hotheaded jerks.
Oh, I forgot one: look at the domestic abuse numbers for law enforcement officers too.
Edit: here’s at least one citation:
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-police-compare-differen...
It's also not quite fair to analyze this data without also taking into account the prevalence of violent crime in general at each country in question. Of course a country with more violent crime will result in more violent policing.
I'm not saying that it doesn't make any valid points, but you can literally make any profession or population of people look bad if you cherry pick data-points and provide politically biased commentary while also not explaining co-factors or context.
Do you think this would be a sustainable organization? Should the general population look at a given representative and think "90% probability this is a good person" or should they think "10% probability this person is a violent thug who can hurt or kill me with impunity, and in any group of ten reps one might try to kill me and the others will look the other way?" What is the right way to engage with an organization like that? And over time is this organization going to reform itself, or is it increasingly going to attract bad people and drive away the decent ones?
There's a lot at stake here. Recent anti-accountability political activism by police leadership and union bosses is really scary and counterproductive stuff even if most cops are fundamentally decent.
I think on average, I saw an act of gross police misbehavior about once a month. Sometimes it was quite savage. Always racist. I'm white, but many of my friends weren't. 20 years later I still have intrusive memories of standing by helplessly while terrible things were said and done to my not-white friends, and I still have violent fantasies about those cops getting theirs in kind.
Sure, this was often aimed at young people who may or may not be smoking pot or engaged in other mildly truant behavior. The police were not reacting to the truant behavior. They were targeting the minorly truant young people because they wanted to get their rocks off, and these victims were easily available and had no recourse.
This feels a bit like Father Ted's defense of the Church's child protection record: "Say if there are 200 million priests in the world and five percent are paedophiles. That's still only 10 million."
1 in 100 would be _far_ too high. Maybe 1 in 100 people are awful in the general population, but ideally you'd hold police to a much higher standard.
I thought that Google was supposed to stop the AMP project? can't they automatically redirect old AMP URLs to the correct real URL?
When the officer arrived at the window, he did question why I didn't stop at the original spot. After explaining, he said he appreciated the thought. I still received the ticket.
Point of the story? Not every LEO is an asshole.
As for the Arkansas lady, did you watch the video? IIRC, she went quite a ways before he PIT'd her. I would agree he shouldn't have done the PIT on her so soon, but it wasn't the case of her going a few hundred feet more.