It's crocodile tears. Police chiefs knew all along about the deplorable amount of racism and casual violence on their forces, they just chose to ignore them. Now the political winds are shifting and they have to go along to keep their jobs.
Change does not require looting and beatings does it? Wouldn't looting and beatings simply give the police more power, and be counter productive against making police more accountable?
Looters and those who bash people's skulls in are opportunists who don't care about change. The ones that want change see their opportunity slipping away.
Yeah that's what people said for twenty years. So people wrote letters and went to court and the media. Turns out that didn't work.
Actually, have you seen Daniel Shaver's killing? No riot. Outcome: that policeman collects a pension and rests easy at home. So it is established your technique doesn't work.
When the good things don't work, eventually you get the bad things. That's not even through people changing. It's through the people changing. I remember reading in the WSJ or the NYT about one particular time in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's recent history when there was a bit of tension between their young firebrand wing and their older mellower leaders (though both were still religious). At the time, the older leader was in hiding (on account of the military looking for him) and there was a bit of violence so he came out to appeal for peace and was promptly arrested. This had the predictable effect of weakening the mellow side and turning the organization more radical (or so the article predicted).
So you don't have to turn people into rioters, you can just destroy the credibility of everyone calling for peaceful resolutions by dismissing them out of hand repeatedly. Eventually no one will listen to them. And then the only people with power in those groups are the firebrands. A complete own-goal if you're looking for peace.
Regardless of the effectiveness of peaceful protests over the past 20 years, violent ones are even less likely to see change. Those already on the fence or against the issue will just use it as an opportunity to dismiss it all as thugs interested in chaos, no matter that the majority are peaceful.
Can't dismiss it now. Every major corporation and most congressional lawmakers are now pushing for reform.
Especially worth looking at Rep. Joyce Beatty who is a 70 year old black woman who got peppersprayed with the protesters. An elected lawmaker was attacked by the cops. Think about it.
i would say it is short term gain, but longer term police and businesses will just leave black neighborhoods leaving them even more broken and poverty stricken, meanwhile the politicians will keep them on welfare and drugs to bring in the vote
It's already achieved more, so I think we're good here. But the truth is that this is out of control of individuals. The system of groups of people responds to the stimulus in predictable ways. This was unavoidable.
> Change does not require looting and beatings does it?
Just how long do you think the civil rights movement has been a thing? 50 years of doing things the way the white people demanded - peaceful protests, sit ins, black political leaders. Yup, it helped, it went down, but it never solved the problem, and I see no indication that it would have on a reasonable time scale. And the whole time you've got people STILL saying "no not like that. No you can't kneel at a football game. Shut up and dribble. Shut up and sing."
Nah. The money to pay back damaged shops should come straight out of the police budget for two reasons: 1. Failure to stop police brutality. 2. Failure to deescalate peaceful protests, in fact, for doing the opposite and firing on peaceful protesters and driving them to riot.
Absolutely disgusting the videos coming out of the last three days. A few burnt out targets is a small price to pay for popping the eyes of multiple people, for tear gassing little girls, for running over protesters, for letting go white people firing arrows at protesters. The cops are lucky it didn't get even more violent. They're damn lucky nobody snapped after getting shot by paintballs on their own porch and started firing back.
They will not listen just because a couple thousand people break windows and light things on fire. They will instead tell us there is no choice but to make this more of a police state.
The only thing that may work is to get everyone to use their voice. Historically, probably only a tiny fraction of the population have used their voice. The vast majority of us need to stop being silent.
You don't understand the power the government can wield if there is "justification" for it. The only way to have the government serve us instead of control us is to be loud, in the majority, and peaceful. At least in a country like the US.
What you're saying hinges on the people never stepping outside the bounds of what the US government deems acceptable.
Consider that the US government deems what we want (no more police brutality) unacceptable, by definition, we need to work outside the system to solve the problem.
It's similar to 2a people I've met that think that somehow the constitution guarantees their right to overthrow the US government if it becomes tyrannical. That's absurd. The US government would never let itself be overthrown. There's no internal system for such a thing.
The US government will also never fall to external forces, unless we are nuked. Their power far exceeds what most of the general population can imagine. The only way to change life as a citizen is to get the majority of the population on your side and to be loud. And if you get criminal or violent for no reason (there's a difference between directly fighting against police brutality and beating a small business owner senseless because he doesn't want you robbing him) the government will easily squash you.
> (there's a difference between directly fighting against police brutality and beating a small business owner senseless because he doesn't want you robbing him)
Fyi this is an example I often see spoken of, and then when it gets linked to it's actually a man that was charging at protesters with a sword unprovoked.
It's not just about what the US government deems acceptable, it's about what the US people deem acceptable. There's a breaking point where the general public will start demanding that looters be shot as a matter of pure self-defense - and as you can see in right-leaning media outlets, some people are already there.
The police and police wives in my family were the loudest mockers of the kneeling protests, which were perfectly quiet and peaceful.
"Blacks commit crimes at higher rates than others."
"It's not a police problem, it's a crime problem."
"I don't want to hear this crap when I get home from work."
> Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. -- John F. Kennedy, 1962
The inaction of police to reform themselves and elected officials to reform the laws that govern them is incentive to make it much easier for domestic terrorism to thrive.
Getting mocked was its method of operation. Politicizing a sporting event is controversial and controversy brings media coverage. The fact that it got a lot of media coverage meant that it was doing something.
If the change hasn’t happened yet, what other options are left? Looting? Probably not. Protests until meaningful reform occurs? Might help if nothing else has.
A government is supposed to be afraid of the electorate (Jefferson). They’ve lost that fear, and you see that trickle down from legislators all the way to law enforcement.
The electorate induces fear by holding the ability to give and take power from the government. They make their demands known by being loud. The vast majority of us have been guilty of being silent when our neighbor is desperately imploring the government for change. I am guilty of silence, and I regret it and will make my demands known.
All of this does not mean that the reasonable peaceful path is not effective. It just tells us citizens must take part.
It is yet to be determined if looting and violence can result in change. What is most likely is that the government uses this to justify greater oppression.
“If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.” - Victor Hugo
The lesson will not be learned. The only thing that will happen is that even more excess force will be justified, and our civil liberties will go away in the name of order and safety.
Hundreds of videos have emerged of police brutality over the past few days. In how many of those videos do you see "good cops" taking down those bad cops committing acts of brutality?
Almost never. I myself have only seen two videos where this has been the case, out of hundreds!
Police racism and violence is an issue, but it becomes egregious when the rest of the police force just stands by.
Are there any videos or stories at all over the past few days?
There have been reports in some cities of the actual good cops here and there taking part in the protests and actually looking like they want to improve things in their communities, but I haven't heard of anything where the police have intervened on cops that were escalating violence and brutalizing protesters.
It would be a pretty big turning point in the protests if this is actually happening
There’s a video of a cop pushing a kneeling woman and then a black woman police officer yells at him for a little bit, that’s about it. I guess you could count the video of a Seattle cop telling another cop to take his knee off of a protester’s throat.
> I guess you could count the video of a Seattle cop telling another cop to take his knee off of a protester’s throat.
Yeah but that only happened after the crowd was screaming at them to take their knee off. I doubt that would have happened if it weren't for the protestors and the optics of doing literally exactly what kicked off this latest protest to begin with. If those cops were alone and making that arrest a month ago I highly doubt the other cop would have stepped in to move his knee.
You are arguing a completely different point than your parent/thread.
You are saying "there exist police departments which are friendly with the protesters".
The thread you are replying to isn't talking about protests; it's discussing the absence of evidence where police officers actively intervened and stopped the excessive use of force by a fellow officer.
In the USA, a civilian doesn't have the right to defend themselves from an officer under any circumstances in most states. A very few states allow you to shoot to defend yourself (even from officers who don't present themselves as officers) under very narrow circumstances. Any way you cut it, police are given benefit of the doubt when interacting with suspects but the cheaper internet-connected cameras get, the more evidence that we should probably revisit that long-held doctrine.
Yup, and then there's other videos of cops marching with protesters... Straight into the waiting arms of the national guard, where protesters get boxed in, shot at, and arrested.
The police in Columbus, Ohio marched with protesters earlier today, minutes ago they tear gassed legal media observers despite their plainly identifying themselves. Countless more examples. It’s PR.
The only one I've seen was where two cops were restraining someone while being filmed. One of the cops had his knee on the arrestee's head/neck, and after some time his partner (administering cuffs perhaps) noticed it and wrenched his knee away.
I think I saw that one; they took the knee away because it was on a white guy's neck, wasn't it? We've already seen what happens when it's a black guy's neck
In this case, the knee was there regardless and the colleague recognised the "bad optics" (as they say). Looked like natural behaviour from the first cop rather than "I'm trying to prove we kneel on all necks" too.
Probably because it was boilerplate. When people show up in threads with a pre-existing list of links, that's not conversation, that's talking-points. HN threads are supposed to be conversations.
Gotta love a three-hour old account trying to convince people that police racism and violence isn't real. Are we twitter now @dang? The astroturfing hasn't been subtle lately.
We've banned that account for breaking the site guidelines. But why are you breaking them yourself? Insinuations about astroturfing without evidence are not allowed, for reasons I've explained extensively (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). And obviously you shouldn't be responding like this or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23386438. Doing that helps nothing; it only makes this place even worse.
The guidelines specifically ask you not to feed egregious comments by replying (a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls), but to flag them instead. Other users did that, and so the GP comment was rightly flagkilled. If you had done that instead, that would have happened sooner.
I'll read them today. Apologies for making the forum worse, I'll try to change. I've been struggling with a lot of anger surrounding this issue lately. Maybe it'd be best if I took a break from HN for a while.
How did I break site guidelines? The comment I was replying to made wildly exaggerated claims about police violence and racism. I am simply trying to improve the quality of discussion by focusing on what the evidence actually allows us to conclude.
I understand that for controversial topics many people have deeply held beliefs and so experience a strong emotional reaction if they are questioned. It is easier to dismiss someone as a "troll" rather than examining why they hold these beliefs.
This was admittedly my lowest quality comment, but it is hard to see what was objectionable about the previous three comments, which were almost instantly flagged. The statistical evidence points to a very small role for racial bias in explaining differences in the use of deadly force by the police. What's wrong with pointing that out when it is directly relevant to the discussion?
