Racism

[Bruce Spanner]

7 minutes ago, Leyton388 said:

I was there in 2007 and ended up in the ESPN bar to watch us play Bolton. Ended up taking the place over with a bunch of New York reds singing songs ect. Was fantastic. 

 

Definitely making plans to go back some time soon when all this comes to an end. 

 

Get yourself here...

 

https://11thstbar.com/new-york-east-village-11th-st-bar-events

[SasaS]

16 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

Here is one for you to chew on lid.

 

Yesterday a Columbus OH officer fires 4 bullets into the chest of a 15 year old black girl who called police for help as she was being attacked in her own home. Officer rolls up, has no idea who is who and within seconds starts firing.

The police Chief there is the interim. Why? Because the previous Chief was relieved following the shooting of another un armed black man a couple months earlier.

 

What to do, what to do?

I don't know.

On the Columbus shooting, did you watch the video they released?

[TheHowieLama]

4 minutes ago, SasaS said:

I don't know.

On the Columbus shooting, did you watch the video they released?

Yep.

[Skidfingers McGonical]

Which girl was it that was holding the knife and ready to plung it in to the other girl? I have only seen a still of the video.

[TheHowieLama]

3 minutes ago, Skidfingers McGonical said:

Which girl was it that was holding the knife and ready to plung it in to the other girl? I have only seen a still of the video.

They both had knives (allegedly).

 

The girl who was shown was the girl who was initially being attacked by the other(s) (it started inside her house and I think they said there were two or three assailants) - she called the cops.

[SasaS]

It is not a great video, but the scene looks pretty violent and chaotic and the girl very much out of control. It's not conclusive whether he prevented her stabbing the other girl by shooting (and he probably didn't have to fire four times), but it is hardly "white cop shoots black girl who called for help in the chest". If he didn't do nothing and she stabbed her in front of him, it would be "black girl stabbed in front of white cop who does nothing". He probably could have shot in the air first to try to stop them. But they do keep on fighting for about 15 seconds like he isn't there.

[TheHowieLama]

You do know what led up to that, right?

[Scooby Dudek]

8 hours ago, Ne Moe Imya said:

Let's hope so.

 

One of the things I find really distasteful about the internet is the way that we all pretend that we're not just sentencing these monsters to years in prison, but also to be raped while they're there. I know it's just a joke but it's such a distasteful one to me that I can't help but comment on it.

Worth watching all of it, but from 3:11 he talks about prison rape jokes;

 

 

[Bjornebye]

Just seen the video. Very tough call for the officer that. The girl could have easily dealt a killing blow with that knife in that very split second. 

[Anubis]

1 hour ago, TheHowieLama said:

Here is one for you to chew on lid.

 

Yesterday a Columbus OH officer fires 4 bullets into the chest of a 15 year old black girl who called police for help as she was being attacked in her own home. Officer rolls up, has no idea who is who and within seconds starts firing.

The police Chief there is the interim. Why? Because the previous Chief was relieved following the shooting of another un armed black man a couple months earlier.

 

What to do, what to do?

 

Put SasaS in charge so he can resign after the next shooting?

[Leyton388]

1 hour ago, Bruce Spanner said:

 

Get yourself here...

 

https://11thstbar.com/new-york-east-village-11th-st-bar-events

I'll definitely be going there mate. 

[Leyton388]

30 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

Just seen the video. Very tough call for the officer that. The girl could have easily dealt a killing blow with that knife in that very split second. 

Would a taser not have resolved the incident? 

[SasaS]

1 hour ago, TheHowieLama said:

You do know what led up to that, right?

No, what? They are saying she called the police accusing the people of attacking her (I presume other teens in the video?) but didn't see any explanation of what transpired. In the cop video you can see her and then some other guy fighting with a girl which ends up on the ground and then she appears to be going after another girl, whn the cop shoots.   

[Bjornebye]

32 minutes ago, Leyton388 said:

Would a taser not have resolved the incident? 

Yep probably. I don't know. She wasn't stopping whatever it was until something made her stop. 

[SasaS]

1 hour ago, Anubis said:

 

Put SasaS in charge so he can resign after the next shooting?

I wouldn'r resign, I would let them sack me then hire you to represent me when I sue them.

[TheHowieLama]

25 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

Yep probably. I don't know. She wasn't stopping whatever it was until something made her stop. 

Perhaps the knowledge that the police had arrived after she called them would have been enough.

Unfortunately in this instance I don't believe she was aware of that as the cop never id's himself and shoots so quickly - there are a bunch of people around her and they barely have time to react.

 

 

As to the original question to @SasaS what do you think?

You seemed to have a strong opinion previously on resignations.

[SasaS]

50 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

Perhaps the knowledge that the police had arrived after she called them would have been enough.

Unfortunately in this instance I don't believe she was aware of that as the cop never id's himself and shoots so quickly - there are a bunch of people around her and they barely have time to react.

 

 

As to the original question to @SasaS what do you think?

You seemed to have a strong opinion previously on resignations.

Your take on what I said is a bit baffling, I don't have strong opinion on resignations, I said it was incredible the chief in Minneapolis is still there, after heading the department for four years and being near the top of it for six, and all the others are routinely being dismissed or resigning. He is equally or more accountable as the chiefs in Atlanta, Capitol, this Minneapolis suburb recently etc. because list of criticisms aimed at his PD is much longer. The fact he is black should not protect him from accountability, chiefs are either accountable in these incidents or they are not, none of them is directly personally responsible, except maybe the Capitol guy and that is probably debatable (how is responsibility distributed for security failure). If it is politically important that the chief of MPD is black, they should appoint another black policeman, he is not the only one there.

[Chocoholic]

Hahaha, brilliant!

[Bruce Spanner]

Great article from The Atlantic...

 

'During his closing argument, Steve Schleicher, one of the prosecutors trying the former police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, insisted that jurors could convict Chauvin without convicting policing.

“This is not an anti-police prosecution,” Schleicher told the jury. “It’s a pro-police prosecution.”

 

For his part, Chauvin’s defense attorney, Eric Nelson, told the jury that “all of the evidence shows that Mr. Chauvin thought he was following his training. He was, in fact, following his training.”

 

Both were correct.

 

In May 2020, four days after the harrowing video of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck while he begged for his life was first seen by the public, Chauvin became one of the few police officers ever indicted for killing someone in the line of duty. Yesterday, as my colleague David A. Graham wrote, he became one of the even fewer to be convicted.

 

The video of Floyd’s murder sparked what may have been the largest civil-rights protests in American history; it was the most consequential entry in a thick catalog of police abuses recorded by cellphone cameras. But whatever verdict the jury rendered, police advocates would have claimed victory. Chauvin’s acquittal would have reinforced the presumption that any use of force by a white police officer against a Black man is reasonable. His conviction, though, was swiftly claimed as affirmation that the current system is capable of dispensing justice. Shortly after the verdict was handed down, Patrick Yoes, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, declared that “our system of justice worked as it should.”

 

But the system seldom works this way. Police are rarely fired, let alone criminally convicted, for the use of force. Chauvin’s nonchalance in the video as Floyd begs for his life, and the apparent inaction of the officers around him, represent more than individual indifference to human life. They are a reflection of a system that rarely holds officers accountable for abusing their powers, and a society that expects police to dispense “rough justice.”

 

Police unions have successfully instituted rules that make it tremendously difficult for officers who abuse their powers to be fired. The doctrine of qualified immunity means that officers are very rarely liable in civil court for violations of Americans’ constitutional rights. Officers themselves are discouraged from speaking up about colleagues who regularly engage in such behavior, because they may be labeled rats and feel ostracized, and the officers they name are unlikely to face sanction anyway, rendering such courage both futile and self-destructive.  

 

Although courts sometimes correct egregious abuses—they may exclude evidence that is unlawfully obtained or disregard forced confessions—most interactions between the public and officers who abuse their authority never see the inside of a courtroom. Instead, they take place in a legal nether-realm, where people who have committed no crime at all can be abused with impunity so long as no one whips out a cellphone camera. Indeed, if not for the bravery of Darnella Frazier, the teenager who recorded the video of Floyd’s arrest, his death might have been falsely attributed in official records to his “physically resist[ing]” officers. It might have simply been another in the hundreds of incidents in which officers in Minnesota used neck restraints on suspects.

 

There are significant systemic barriers to holding police accountable for misconduct, but there are also cultural ones. Many Americans want police to “rough up” those considered to be criminals or proximate to criminality—an expectation that has persisted for generations. “Progressive reformers of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century … took aim at police corruption but often saw nothing wrong with encouraging officers to use their nightsticks liberally against criminals and reprobates,” the Stanford Law professor and former prosecutor David Alan Sklansky writes in A Pattern of Violence. “Newspapers praised ‘beneficial clubbing’ by the police. Many reformers linked police corruption with toleration of vice; they wanted the police to get tough with lawbreakers.”

 

That expectation swells during periods of rising crime. In the 1970s and ’80s, Sklansky writes, a “growing concern about violent crime” made “many people tolerant of, or even eager for, ‘rough tactics’ by the police. Just as in earlier eras, there was a growing sentiment that it was time for the police to take their gloves off.” When former President Donald Trump encouraged an audience of police on Long Island in 2017 to abuse suspects in their custody, the officers laughed because Trump was articulating that unstated expectation in his own blunt fashion.

 

There will be more Derek Chauvins, because his conviction alters nothing about this system. It does not change the fact that police who engage in such behavior can expect to rely on the silence of their colleagues, the elaborate protections established by legal doctrine and collective bargaining, and the quiet expectation that hurting the “right” people is an admirable part of the job. To the contrary: Powerful political actors are committed to ensuring that this system remains unchanged, some of whom are praising Chauvin’s conviction as justice being served.

 

After the verdict was announced, though, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson called Chauvin’s conviction an “attack on civilization.” And in this sense alone he was right: It is an attack on a certain idea of civilization when a white police officer is convicted for killing a Black man. America’s traditional racial hierarchy is eroded by the notion that the lives of two such people have equal value. For most of its existence, American law assumed, tacitly or explicitly, that such violence was how “civilization” was maintained, an assumption that shapes both politics and law enforcement to this day. The challenge for those disgusted by Chauvin’s conviction is to defend impunity for such violence as an essential part of their ideal society, without explicitly acknowledging its nature.

 

When Chauvin’s defense attorney said Chauvin was merely following his training, he may not have been strictly correct about Chauvin’s use of a particular neck restraint. But he was probably right that Chauvin was doing what he believed he was both allowed and expected to do. The next Chauvin will feel the same way. But next time, there may not be a brave person with a camera to bear unimpeachable witness.'

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/adam-serwer-there-will-be-more-derek-chauvins/618659/

[VladimirIlyich]

I have a sneaky feeling the guilty verdict had to be delivered to save the city from burning to the ground but some back room dealing will see him sentenced much more lightly than he deserves,outside the public eye.

[TheHowieLama]

His sentence will be public record.

 

@VladimirIlyich so you believe he was not guilty of the charges he was convicted for?

 

 

[Strontium]

3 hours ago, Bruce Spanner said:

Although courts sometimes correct egregious abuses—they may exclude evidence that is unlawfully obtained or disregard forced confessions—most interactions between the public and officers who abuse their authority never see the inside of a courtroom. Instead, they take place in a legal nether-realm, where people who have committed no crime at all can be abused with impunity so long as no one whips out a cellphone camera. Indeed, if not for the bravery of Darnella Frazier, the teenager who recorded the video of Floyd’s arrest, his death might have been falsely attributed in official records to his “physically resist[ing]” officers.

 

People are quick to criticise mobile phone culture, but it brings with it a new era of accountability. Every citizen is a potential journalist now. Authorities need to tread more carefully because anyone could be documenting their misdeeds.

[TheHowieLama]

11 minutes ago, Strontium Dog™ said:

 

People are quick to criticise mobile phone culture, but it brings with it a new era of accountability. Every citizen is a potential journalist now. Authorities need to tread more carefully because anyone could be documenting their misdeeds.

Hong Kong and Myanmar would have had zero publicity without them. 

[Strontium]

On 21/04/2021 at 14:11, SasaS said:

No, what? They are saying she called the police accusing the people of attacking her (I presume other teens in the video?) but didn't see any explanation of what transpired. In the cop video you can see her and then some other guy fighting with a girl which ends up on the ground and then she appears to be going after another girl, whn the cop shoots.   

 

I've seen a slowed down version of the video now. She's armed with a steak knife or similar, and is a split second away from stabbing another girl in the neck. I don't know how anyone could watch that and think the police officer's actions were anything other than reasonable in the circumstances.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

Here's another one to be stamped with Dolly Parton's quote: "If something's wrong, fix it. Don't be a dumbass."

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56840131