Could we please stop calling “protesters” all the people looting jewelry stores, Target, Nike, etc? These are not protesters, these are looters. Police should use any means at their disposal to protect lives and property from looters and rioters.
By the same token, can we please stop calling "police" all the people bashing in heads, punching journalists, planting evidence, instigating violence? They are not police, they are violent thugs. Protesters should use any means at their disposal to protect their own lives from violent thugs.
The police have taken an oath, have systemic training, and are funded and protected. They should be held to, at minimum, their systemic failures, but probably their oaths and training (which includes constitutional law and appropriate force)
On the other hand, the only thing that protestors have guaranteed to be in common is that they've shown up in a place.
But they literally are police--that's the difference between these two arguments. Police can be held to account through voting and policy shifts, individuals cannot without community enforcement.
Murdering people in cold blood is part of policing?
Here's the part you're missing: the protests are holding the police to account, and they're the only way available for the community to enforce basic rule of law on the police. If not for the protests, the officer(s) in question would be getting some paid time off to fund a vacation to the beach. Literally. And that's despite the community already having voted for stricter regulations by clear majorities and not getting them because white votes are counted more in our political system than black ones, and that's despite voter suppression disproportionately restricting black voters' access to the polls.
Imagine one of the bystanders when George Floyd was killed had responded like this. The police are killing him, so a bystander -- or maybe even more than one -- pulls out a gun and starts shooting at them in George's defense. Imagine the kind of conversation we'd be having now.
Absolutely and I don’t think that any reasonable person will have any problem with those. I can’t speak for all the places in US but my observations in San Jose (both personal and through FB/media) is that police was cool with peaceful protests. I saw a few times police and protesters hugging each other, doing fist bumps, etc.
From my experience a protest usually becomes exactly as violent as the police initiates. In every protest I’ve attended the police is always the most violent actor.
Could we please not waste a second of thought on the relatively minor issue of broken store windows until we sort the issue of cops indiscriminately killing black people?
If you care so much, how about petition your local police force to dump their tear gas at the range and stop firing on peaceful protesters, turning a lot of sitting people into a riot.
Sadly it’s expected here. We all know PoC are sorely underrepresented in tech. We are a reflection of the problem at hand - the result of years and years of systemic racism and sexism.
It's not a minor issue. It detracts significantly from the really issue at hand, making it nearly impossible to engage with protestors in a dialog as the small number of folks intent on violence and looting take all of the resources and attention, severely undermining the point of the protests, especially because it provides those disinclined to sympathy for the real issue to paint all with the same brush and so dismiss them.
Before it was looting, it was that kneeling at a football game distracts from the game. Before that, it was "no, no, protest will never work, you need to get more black people elected! Try to get a black president maybe!" Before that, it something else equally absurd.
No matter how black people try to get their voices heard about police violence, there will be people who doggedly tear those voices down by any means necessary.
We're talking about the fact that 14% of the US population can't call the cops for fear of dying.
Kneeling during the national anthem at football games should have been an issue between the players and the NFL, but the kind of people who attend football games disapproved of it.
In Minneapolis today due to the videos which were captured even those anti-kneeling americans largely recognize the problem and support solutions. But by allowing the rump to be violent (or equivalently, serruptitiously distribute bricks and gasoline) the activists are losing public support.
Roughly 200 mostly commercial buildings burned in the main shopping area for (working class) Minneapolis over the weekend. The food and pharmaceutical desert is going to kill far more of the poor and marginalized than police violence would have, in a city that already votes D up and down the ticket.
The violence is not necessary, nor productive, nor are the situations comparable.
Expecting the protesters to somehow control everyone in the protest, when the cops fire indiscriminately on people whether they're peaceful or otherwise, doesn't seem like a working system.
But hopefully you care about one much, much more than the other. They are not comparable in terms of needing discussion at this moment in history.
(Edit: In the event that you honestly don't know which one is the more important topic, right now or pretty much any other time - police frequently murdering black people or some store windows getting smashed and merch stolen - it's the police murdering black people.)
I can't actually tell which one you're trying to say is more important right now. The case for "riots are the bigger problem right now" being that there is a whole lot more rioting and looting happening right now than there usually is, whereas the amount of police violence is currently significantly below the typical level (as a result of the coronavirus and everyone staying inside, but still).
I’m not so sure you can pin causality here. Anecdotally, the protests I’ve visited in the past have always been exactly as violent as the police initiates. A peaceful police usually means a peaceful protest in my experience. A violent police—on the other hand—can sometimes cause a violent protest, and even a riot.
Crowd control is a science. And you are sort of ignoring the science by claiming that rioters are the cause of the conflict.
> Anecdotally, the protests I’ve visited in the past have always been exactly as violent as the police initiates.
Things escalate when someone escalates them. Sometimes that's the police. Sometimes it isn't. And even when it is, you still have to be willing to be provoked. Don't.
We have people in this thread justifying riots as "we tried kneeling at football games" as if there is some kind of reasonable progression from there to looting and burning down churches.
Like I said, crowd control is a science. Even if you have violent actors at the protest, it is still a failure of crowd control if the whole protest turns violent.
Reacting when violated is a natural reaction. With a group this big you cannot think in individual terms. If provoked there and there is a non-zero chance you’ll see a reaction, you will see a reaction. And now you have a positive feedback loop between the police and protestors that may escalate into riots.
The premise "many assholes are cops" doesn't need a lot of new evidence. There is more than enough existing evidence.
But what do you honestly expect riots to lead to? Concessions? Or loss of the moral high ground and even more riot gear and tear gas and escalation?
It's just handing the cops a free pass to justify arresting you. And not just arresting you, but charging you with something that could actually stick. Its hard to advocate policy when you're serving a decade in prison for arson and conspiracy.
Riots have a history of escalating (often by someone with an agenda), my family and town was worried last night that they would come here (several arrests were made), and do real harm. That is they might be less now but from store windows to killing people is not that big a stretch.
I'm not convinced the rioters care about police violence either. From what I ca see the riots are outside groups with riot and anarchy as an agenda. My right wing friends are blaming George Soros, my left wing friends some nameless white supremacist group. I have no idea what the truth is, and don't expect to find out for months if ever.
Is it? Is it wrong to remove someone's freedom of movement... After they assault someone? Removing someone's freedom of movement (jailing them) is Wrong, after all.
How are you going to fix police brutality with more brutality? What is the end goal anyway, the state won't be defeated and the #1 group suffering are the people who lost jobs, homes, and loved ones.
Is the idea to make a mess and then police will be "ok guys, we get it now, we will be nice". Obviously you will have to change the laws and this could have been the initial objective through peaceful protests only.
> Could we please not waste a second of thought on the relatively minor issue of broken store windows until we sort the issue of cops indiscriminately killing black people?
Seconds of thought aren't wasted. Stay in the present. It's only an emergency if you make it one.
> "until we sort the issue of cops indiscriminately killing black people?"
Can we please stop making this just about race and recognize we have a general police brutality issue? You do realize cops kill just as many whites as they do blacks. The same police that killed George Floyd also killed Justine Damond.
When you rationalize away the white people who also have been killed, you polarize the issue and give justification to those who are committing violence and looting.
> You do realize cops kill just as many whites as they do blacks
Normalized for population, in the US the rate is 3X for black people, and a white person's expectation to be killed by police is less than the average.
and you could do the SAME thing with black people and homicide and aggravated assault rates. Then you would go on to say those particular rates are racist to say. Are you ready to stop rationalizing away the deaths that everyone is facing and stop arguing over skin color and start talking about police brutality?
or do you want to keep arguing about something besides the point? if so, why?
You actually can't, because such studies are based on arrest rates, not the unstudied "amount it actually happens."
Furthermore, something like that can't be pinned on "race," which is already a nebulous concept that exists only as an ill-defined cultural construct, whereas "cop" is a defined entity.
What that statistic shows is that even if some white people can't bring themselves to get angry about police murdering black people they should at least be angry about police also murdering white people.
What that statistic definitely doesn't mean is that people shouldn't be angry about police murdering black people.
It does show however that the police very likely doesn't target people by skin color or that some is disproportionate violence. I am not from the US and I thought the numbers to be higher to be honest.
The 2020 data there is interesting. It's less dramatic than it looks on that graph because they only have the numbers from the first quarter for 2020, but even extrapolating from the quarter to the year, it looks like "number of people shot to death by the police in the United States" has been more than cut in half by the coronavirus.
> I would prefer to look at it by police encounter or by crime or something like that
How would that fix anything? Look at the numbers of white vs black people who were picked for stop-and-frisks (read: number of white vs black people who were suspected of crime) as well as the innocence ratings: https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-frisk-data
If 5% of a population ("Young black and Latino males between the ages of 14 and 24") accounts for 38% of the stop-and-frisk and is innocent 80% of the time, doesn't that sound like targetting? If you look harder for crime from certain demographics, you'll find more crime from them. Replace the targetted demographic with another demographic and you'll find way more crime in that other demographic. But get this - once you target people and get stats on them, you now have "statistics" and "facts" that show you were right and should continue to target them - even though your statistics are garbage collected on unrepresentative samples! This is why per-capita is the best metric to use - any other metric is tainted.
> total number of killings for white on white or black on black is roughly the same despite the 15% number you quoted.
What does this have to do with anything? Just because there are a lot of "black on black" murders doesn't justify the amount of black people killed by cops. Honestly, I don't even care if the officers are white, black, or any other race or ethnicity. It's the victims who matter. Just because an innocent black person is killed by a black police officer, does not mean it had nothing to do with the victim's race, nor does it mean we can ignore how disproportionately policing is applied.
If you adjust by per-police encounter you've already shot yourself in the foot - we know that police stop black people at a far greater percentage than white:
Hahahaha I gotta say I wasn't expecting a gamer statistic poster on HN. At a minimum I'd expect everyone here to understand the difference between "volume" and "per capita."
Statistics can absolutely be racist. Numbers might not lie (except when they do), but they can use some odd definition, use different metrics, or scale different populations differently/unevenly (as is the case here).
When you use any misleading technique on a statistic that obscures the truth, you are lying. When you put up a number to proof a point about a minority that is absolutely not true, that is a lie, and this number is racist.
Why are you linking non-normalized statistics? It is such a basic error to not adjust per-capita that part of me doubts how much you care about the truth.
Of-course these things happened. However, they will never reported by the "progressive" MSM. The HN community has blinkers on because the vast majority (not all) of people here are rich and un-affected by such matters.
Do not take my words for it - Please do your own research.
No, we can't. There's simply no stable state where cities are abandoned to looters for weeks. Someone will inevitably deploy force to reestablish control, and if that someone isn't the government then there's gonna be a lot more indiscriminate killing.
