I know politics isn't the usual HN topic, but I think this goes beyond politics at this point. Until I saw this list, I had no idea how out of control this situation has gotten here.
I'm saddened for my country and hope that this can be a turning point for all of us.
I believe strongly that George Floyds death and the reactions thereafter are to a majority of the nation, the same as the 16th Street Church Bombing was in 1963, its a turning point in making people aware of the real costs of our problems with policing.
The fact is, I'm a white dude in my mid-30's, I make a tech salary, and I'm afraid of the police, because an officer with a hair up somewhere could ruin my life for a period of time, if not for good.
Same here. When I see police, I just think, don't go near them or bother them at all. I actively avoid police if I can unless there are a bunch of other people around (concert, sporting event etc.).
The fear I think is more along the lines that police can detain you, arrest you and so on. So I just figure, why chance it? I optimize for lowest risk and I view police as an unnecessary risk.
One of the threads that was eye-opening for me was Greg Doucette's (a lawyer in North Carolina among other things) ongoing Twitter thread with Pics/Video of police brutality as it relates to peaceful protesters/bystanders.
Thanks for pointing that out! Obviously I should have read the spreadsheet/link beforehand, but I hope linking the Twitter thread here directly also helped some people as well.
If you browse the list and feel that it is worth sounding an alarm for being fake, then feel free to do that. I don't think that's what you are doing though, and just sounding a Chicken Little alarm. The list is pretty chilling with video evidence. Really hard to fake this stuff.
Similarly, don't view every list as likely full of false accusations because one you checked was full of false accusations. This one seems meticulously crafted.
A list of three, one of which is a video of a cop slashing a tire, another is a photo of another car in the lot with slashed tires, and the third is a journalist who had to pass the National Guard to find his tires slashed.
The irony here being that since that post was made, we've learned that the slashed tire report isn't fake. The Minnesota police ended up confirming it themselves once reporters contacted them.
I'm not arguing for or against the list being fake, but just because there's a video doesn't mean it's real or relevant.
For example, the other day there was a video being posted around of alleged police brutality, where an officer was using force to arrest some woman. The video was 1) from 2018 2) conveniently trimmed to exclude the first part where the woman was resisting arrest.
There are plenty of people trying to push a narrative right now, so just be very critical of the information presented to you.
OK, but let's contrast `greg_douchette thread` TGDs #1 and #2. #1 shows a woman wanding around holding a sign. A mounted policeman rides up behind her and just rides right over her. There's enough context to see that it's obviously completely unprovoked, and that either the officer did it on purpose, or there was criminal negligence in his training of how to handle a horse (and/or the training of the horse on how to avoid trampling people).
Now take for example `greg_douchette thread` TGD #2. That shows the instant that a man with a shirt that says "NYPD" on the back shoves a woman onto the ground. Obviously that was pretty violent.
EDIT: I more or less retract the analysis below; more information here:
Leaving my original post for posterity / discussion.
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But I've seen that same scene from a different video (sorry don't have he link to hand), and it raises a lot of questions for me. The person wearing the shirt doesn't have any other equipment on -- no helmet, no belt or walkie-talkie or anything. He's not standing side-to-side with a bunch of police facing off against protesters. There's a long stream of people mixed together, meandering in the same direction. Is this actually a protest? Is the guy in question on duty, or is he just trying to get home like everyone else?
And from the other video you can see that just before the incident, the woman was walking backwards in front of the guy. My best guess is that the guy was off-duty (or trying to get off-duty), just walking somewhere, and that the woman came up to him and was verbally harassing him. Eventually he got fed up and shoved her out of his way; but because he's huge and she's tiny, he shoved her about 5x harder than necessary, causing her injury.
These to me are very different things. In the first we have a man who is clearly on duty, doing something clearly dangerous, to someone who is clearly doing something peaceful and constitutionally protected. In the second, we have a man who may not be on duty, having someone harassing him to his face, and responding in a way that isn't obviously going to cause her injury.
But you wouldn't be able to tell any of that that from the video linked in this spreadsheet. So that makes me question -- of the 700 videos listed, how many are like #1 and how many are like #2? Maybe a lot of people don't care, but I do.
I watched close to 100 of them last night from Greg's thread, I saw very few "minor" ones like your #2, most involve people being shot / struck by batons, cars, gang tackled and beaten by multiple people ...
I'd put the ratio at something like 85/15.
Most of them are individual or small group acts that are completely unacceptable, fire them immediately sort of things (indiscriminately pepper spraying non-protestors walking down a public street, firing a tear gas canister into a person just standing around's chest, an insane amount of gang tackling, pummeling, and neck kneeling given the context of the protests)
Some are insidious but not necessarily criminal, just groups being tear gassed, military style shows of force, etc.
A small but real minority of vidsos are what I'd call products of anti police bias, ambiguous context, or (at least imo) felt out of context.
But also "verbally harassment" of police is largely Constitutionally protected, but yes, tons of videos of people being arrested, often violently, simply for using words.
As a whole, Greg's thread is terrifying. Our police training here is piss poor.
There was a video, I think from LA, where some protesters on one side of the road yelled at rit police on the other side of the road. Usually, not a big deal. And then a couple of officers decided to pull out a guy from the group, who happened to be black, pull him to the ground, beat him with batons. Pepper spaying a woman next to him. All while being filmed. In June 2020.
Despite being disgusting, unwarranted, racist and unacceptable, the sheer amount of stupidity, ignorance and arrogance this shows is just mindboggling. And makes that totally inentional.
Is it out of control though? The police has 700K members in the US. Millions of daily interactions with people of all kinds. All you could find is 400 cases from ALL the years. And I guess the claim is brutality wasn't justified in every single case. In reality there are not 400 cases on that list, and in many cases the violence was justified.
I'm not saying the police doesn't do wrong, they absolutely do. We have examples of rapes, unjustified murders and beatings, entrapment. They are extremely rare. I think last year the police in the US killed 9 unarmed black men and 21 unarmed white men.
> All you could find is 400 cases from ALL the years.
These aren't from all the years, they're from approximately May 26th of this year. It's 400 cases in the last 3-4 weeks.
That is a startlingly high number, made worse once you actually start digging into the individual incidents, because you realize they're not just isolated. A lot of these videos aren't, "a single police officer does something shifty", they're, "an entire police unit starts firing tear gas at protestors who are kneeling on the ground." And then you start to read the responses from police unions, some of which outright lie about the incidents or contradict the videos. This isn't a problem with individual officers, it's a problem with high-level commanders and police union leaders -- it's a problem that spans entire units.
I personally went through about 200 incidents for a separate project I was working on, some more in-depth than others. I think people are looking at these lists and thinking, "oh sure, but if you zoom in and examine each incident, it gets better." It really doesn't. It didn't take me long to get accustomed to seeing people tear-gassed, those videos don't even make me blink now. But even with that, I was regularly shocked while I was combing through videos with incidents that I wasn't prepared for.
"Tear gas, tear gas, tear gas, holy heck that police officer just body slammed a protestor! Tear gas, tear gas, holy crap they just punched a reporter in the face!"
And again, 4 weeks. Not years. I would challenge anyone who's saying that these are extremely rare or over-dramatized to sit down and devote an evening to just watching the videos in series. It weighs on you. And it quickly becomes obvious that these are not individual rogue officers, these are police units operating in an environment where they know they will not face consequences for hurting protestors.
And not just in recent weeks, also with cameras trained on them and during a protest specifically trying to draw awareness in part to police brutality. My jaw dropped at so many of them.
> Also, are you suggesting that the riots are peaceful?
So apparently you haven't watched any of the videos, huh?
Guess what? The problem is that police are frequently "on edge" in their normal jobs, and as a result innocent people are seriously injured or die. And worse, police are "on edge" far more around blacks than whites, meaning far more blacks are injured by police than whites.
It doesn't matter what the cause is, it's a problem and is has to stop.
>So apparently you haven't watched any of the videos, huh?
Yes, I watched a few from this link, and that admittedly small sample didn't show a single peaceful protester being abused by cops. I suppose you watched more of them?
>Guess what? The problem is that police are frequently "on edge" in their normal jobs, and as a result innocent people are seriously injured or die. And worse, police are "on edge" far more around blacks than whites, meaning far more blacks are injured by police than whites.
Could there be a reason for some of that that is not linked to racism? Are only white policemen more on-edge around black people?
>It doesn't matter what the cause is, it's a problem and is has to stop.
> Yes, I watched a few from this link, and that admittedly small sample didn't show a single peaceful protester being abused by cops.
TGD #1 shows a woman standing with a sign being run over by a horse. That's absolutely peaceful.
TGD #2 shows a woman who was walking backwards in front of a police officer being shoved so hard she flies several meters back and hits her head on the curb. She was in the officer's face, but she certainly wasn't doing anything close to rioting.
I'll watch more later, but so far that's 2/2 at the top of the list showing peaceful protesters being abused.
> Could there be a reason for some of that that is not linked to racism? Are only white policemen more on-edge around black people?
Depends on what you mean by "racism". There was a series of studies a few years ago that put people in classic "shoot / no shoot" scenarios that police are trained on (i.e., you go through a scenario and have to shoot someone before they shoot you, but only if there's actually a gun). They randomly changed the color of the skin of the people involved. Civilians shot far more blacks than whites in "no-shoot" scenarios. Police shot about the same, but there was a longer delay: meaning, their impulse was to shoot blacks faster, but their training allowed a secondary impulse to come in and moderate the first one. (Sorry I can't find a link just now.)
>There was a series of studies a few years ago that put people in classic "shoot / no shoot" scenarios that police are trained on (i.e., you go through a scenario and have to shoot someone before they shoot you, but only if there's actually a gun). They randomly changed the color of the skin of the people involved. Civilians shot far more blacks than whites in "no-shoot" scenarios. Police shot about the same, but there was a longer delay: meaning, their impulse was to shoot blacks faster, but their training allowed a secondary impulse to come in and moderate the first one. (Sorry I can't find a link just now.)
That sounded interesting, so I tried to find some.
-- the conclusion seemed to be exactly counter to what the research you were talking about showed. "In addition, where errors were made, participants across experiments were more likely to shoot unarmed White suspects than unarmed Black or Hispanic suspects, and were more likely to fail to shoot armed Black suspects than armed White or Hispanic suspects."
> Is it out of control though? The police has 700K members in the US. Millions of daily interactions with people of all kinds. All you could find is 400 cases from ALL the years. And I guess the claim is brutality wasn't justified in every single case. In reality there are not 400 cases on that list, and in many cases the violence was justified.
400 ... where there are videos. We know that until a video emerges these get swept under the rug, so I'm willing to bet that there are a fair few more than 400 examples of police brutality.
> 400 ... where there are videos. We know that until a video emerges these get swept under the rug, so I'm willing to bet that there are a fair few more than 400 examples of police brutality.
And those videos have uncovered many instances the the police blatantly lying about their own misconduct in official reports, which is further evidence that the videos are only the tip of the iceberg.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de... just under 1000 police involved shootings each year. Can't find the source, but of these only about 47 were un-armed and most of those involved protecting someone else from a physical attack.
You're looking at a giant list of videos that people think are unjustified. You can go through and weed out videos that you think don't belong there. You can even submit pull requests to more organized compilations to remove unsubstantiated claims.
Your use of "unjustified" is entirely subjective. I don't know what your specific threshold is for justified violence against peaceful protestors, and it's a waste of time to try and guess what that threshold is. It's a waste of time for us to filter the data, only for you to then point out two videos you disagree with and ask everyone to repeat the same work over and over again.
All of the raw data is available to you in a list format. If you think there are errors, then fork the repo, file a pull request, or create an issue. Make your own list that demonstrates your point.
> Officers arrested the man for violating a domestic violence no contact order and unlawful possession of a firearm
> the man went into cardiac arrest during processing.
> Correction officers began resuscitation immediately, police said, and the man was transported to the hospital while he still had a pulse. He later died at the hospital.
> Ms. Harris declined to comment through an Allegheny County Jail Health Justice project spokeswoman, but she has said that her son took an anti-seizure medication twice daily and called her from the jail to ask for help getting health care workers there to give him the medication
> He died of acute peritonitis due to colon perforation, and the death was ruled natural.
> Our records indicate that within ten minutes of Mr. Smart’s arrival at medical intake, our staff ordered the medications he said he needed, and he received those medications as prescribed. During an emergency event later that evening, our records show that our staff administered additional treatment to Mr. Smart and that he responded to the medical care provided.
This is an extremely misleading website and not a reliable source.
I don't know where to get last years data in such detail.
There are plenty of sites that count the number of killings, but this is one of the few that looks for unarmed ones. If you are aware of better or more recent stats (for example the source of this 47 number) I'd love a link.
> half of the cases sound like accidents, out of 104. The remaining is pretty close to 47.
I find it mind-boggling that killing 52 unarmed people by accident is somehow the best case scenario here.
The answer to your questions is that those are not examples of police brutality, so long as the police respond with reasonable force.
Along with reading your other comments here, I viewed these 4 questions as a bad faith attempt at steering the conversation off topic. When people complain about police brutality, we are not talking about the times when police have to legitimately defend themselves or disarm someone. This thread is specifically about the hundreds of clearly documented examples of unprovoked violence by police in the US over the last few weeks, many of them against journalists, elderly people, kneeling protestors and so on. Please engage with that and don't try to change the subject again.
I just gave you a counterargument and an opportunity to turn this around and respond in good faith to the issue at hand. You didn't take it. That's why I'm saying you're arguing in bad faith. You refuse to accept fault or engage with the real issue here, instead resorting to logical phallacies to try and derail the conversation, as most people on the far right do these days. Try again. Can you respond to the issue at hand, ongoing police brutality in the BLM protests?
Every municipality has different rules for officer's conduct. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (Part of the Federal US Department of Justice), there are 17,985 US police agencies, of which 15,400 departments govern the 39,044 distinct local governments and municipalities. These are further divided into autonomous administrative districts often referred to as precincts.
The rules for officer misconduct change in each municipality as reactions to prior conduct or complaints. The rules are based on edicts from the state, as well as interpretations of those edicts by the local police department which create internal policy. The level of compliance with creating and updating internal policies varies. No civilian is able to know or predict the various rationale an officer may use or is able to use to behave any particular way. Civilians learn after they have had a bad encounter with an officer, or are in jail or dead. Juries learn on the spot with prosecutor instructions, sometimes those instructions themselves are misleading or incorrect. The public does not necessarily ever learn what the standards were, and the media learns after the fact and only has a patchwork of "isolated incidents" that occurred in frankly different governing systems. When put together, this fuels discontent with police as an amorphous entity, an interpretation which fuels a growing divide of non-solutions.
So the term "justified" and "unjustified" means nothing because it is different and changing everywhere and is a term that only matches your pre-existing worldview, or your predilection to appeal to authority in counties and states you have never set foot in, let alone participate in.
The number of distinct police forces might already be a problem in itself.
Germany has 16 state level and one federal, plus customs (not legally a police force with a lot less jurisdiction)
France has two, Police national and Gendamerie.
Obviously a slight oversimplification when counting stuff like the BKA / LKA (maybe the German equivalent to the FBI?) as seperate bodies. But roughly across Europe you have two levels,local and federal. Both are reporting, one way or the other, to the respective Ministeries of the Interior. Quite adifference compared to the US, where the highest authority can be a mayor. or none, if I understood the thing with local Sherrifs correctly.
Just imagine you or a beloved one is the victim of police brutality in one of these cases. Take a second to think about it, and see if you're still on the same ground.
I'm saddened for my country and hope that this can be a turning point for all of us.