Forum - View topicActions Speak Louder than Words #BlackLivesMatter
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Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 23859 |
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This is no profound statement, but it looks like the George Floyd tragedy may finally be for African-Americans what #metoo was for sexual assault/harassment. Something feels different, like a breaking point has been reached. Surely to God, an awareness has seeped into police departments that restraint methods and how black suspects (and hopefully other vulnerable groups, like those suffering from mental heath issues, that make interaction with police officers so potentially dangerous) are handled need to be looked at. Proper screening of candidates, proper training of officers. Real consequences when things go south for no good reason. Let's hope.
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Sir Winston C'thulhu
Posts: 32 |
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And that's the world we live in. A guy barges into your home or your store or your friend's/family's store or home, and you shoot him, you're guilty of manslaughter and vigilantism. A white cop slowly suffocates a surrendering, unarmed black man to death who committed no crime in the first place, well, he was "fearing for his life" so it's a-okay! |
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Jeff Bauersfeld
Posts: 109 |
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If you believe I am including myself where I said "several people." I'm not. Nor did I comment positively or negatively on this phenomenon. Also, people typically recognize defending your property or person, or assisting a third party to do so, not as vigilante justice. The important observation is that many people see cops as bad or worse than what the law sees as vigilantes. |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5861 Location: Virginia, United States |
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I agree with some of the aims of the MPD150 project, but it too strongly counts on its social arm to bring about conditions where armed police would not be required. There will always be plenty of people that chose to do evil things, and no amount of social engineering is going to change that. While enacting some of their aims would be helpful, their ultimate aim would make us a prey society for criminals, and people would flee to walled security enclaves (communities) to be safe. Not too mention what would happen to those who cannot afford the security fees for admission. We all saw the video of what happened, there was plenty of probable cause to arrest all four officers that same day. The supervisor of those officers should be fired, the police chief should be fired, and the mayor and governor should be voted out of office. The mayor and governor could have forced the police chief to make the arrests, but ultimately did't, until it was too late to matter. Anybody with brains, knows you don't do that to the human neck, so essentially we watched that police officer murder him on TV. That should have been plain to the mayor and governor. Personally, I would have no problem with the protesters beating up the looters, arsonists, and agitators. It really is not safe to go anywhere retail or public wise right now. In our local area, people were trying to drum up a looting fest on social media at our shopping mall. So it was closed down, boarded up, and surrounded by city and state police. So while some of you will be going out and protesting, some of us will be bunkering down in our homes, pretending we are there due to the Covid virus. |
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Jeff Bauersfeld
Posts: 109 |
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It is the responsibility of the status quo to continually justify itself. As should be plain at this point, the status quo has shown itself to many people to be hazardous to their health. Thus they are justified in changing it, even radically so. So any imagined issues you percieve with the plan pale in comparison to the very real issues being experienced by the status quo. Last edited by Jeff Bauersfeld on Thu Jun 04, 2020 11:36 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Jeff Bauersfeld
Posts: 109 |
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Couldn't have said it better. Also, El Hermano, I can definitely see where what I said implied that you were not a minority yourself. My apologizes. We can all, myself including, listen to more and more viewpoints from PoC, since they are far from a monolith and can show us where parts our positions can come from a place of privilege. Being able to trust the cops is a privilege I may enjoy, but I know that many do not. |
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Silver Kirin
Posts: 1128 |
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It is very unsettling to see what is happening in the U.S. right now, I live in South America so I do not have any experience with racism against me and I haven't met many black people in my life, but it is very sad to see the injustices against them, it is truly perplexing how this kind of violence against afro-americans happens in this day and age.
I do support all of the protesters who march in the name of the BLM movement, although the destruction of property and the looting of business reminds me the riots that my country faced in the early 2000s, though the riots here were caused due to economic problems, I know some people whose business never recovered from those riots even after almost 20 years and I fear that the same can happen to the same small business owners in the U.S. I do not have many resources, but I hope that George Floyd's family can find justice and that the protestors can achieve their goals in a peaceful manner. We're also facing a serious global pandemic so everybody must also take preacautions if they plan to go to protest. |
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jl07045
 Posts: 1527 Location: Riga, Latvia |
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I'm reacting to their proposals not the idea of reforms. The issues I perceive if the plan was realized are much worse than the 'status quo', even for blacks. Unless people like to live in a gang-run society |
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Shaterri
Posts: 173 |
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One of the fundamental problems is, this is simply not true. Study after study has shown that POC are targeted more frequently by law enforcement and consistently have worse outcomes with the justice system even after compensating for conflating factors like income or education. I'll start by pointing you to https://5harad.com/papers/100M-stops.pdf and https://www.aclusocal.org/en/racial-profiling-lapd-study-racially-disparate-outcomes-los-angeles-police-department and https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/empirical_analysis_tables_figures.pdf as things I found with some quick searching, but you can find plenty more yourself. |
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zaphdash
 Posts: 620 Location: Brooklyn |
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The police are a gang.
I realize that is the whitewashed portrayal of King that is offered by American schools, but his feelings on "violent riots" were a little bit more nuanced than that. To wit:
He may have felt that violence alienated potential white allies (see, relatedly, his famous statement that "the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice" presented a greater obstacle than white supremacy and the Klan), but he did not flatly "condemn violent riots." On the contrary, he understood precisely why they occur and recognized that the real problem was not the riot but the conditions that led to it.
The police don't protect anything anyway. The ongoing unrest shows that well enough. People could loot every day if they wanted to. The police are powerless to stop it. What protects "me and my property" (lol) is the fact that on a typical day most people voluntarily adhere to the social contract. Only after society's consistent failure to uphold its end of the bargain do we reach a breaking point like this.
You have this exactly backwards. The police are the foot soldiers of capital. They are here to protect a status quo order that has been engineered to benefit the wealthy and powerful. I'm not sure which "wealthiest people" you are referring to, but they can "appear" -- apt word choice, by the way -- to side with the cause because "appearances" cost them nothing. Later on, VoidSeeker accused ANN of cynically taking this position not out of conviction but in order to drive additional ad clicks. Whether or not that's fair to say about ANN, I don't know (it seems to me like a small enough operation that is under the control of the people producing the content for statements like the one they're making here to be genuine, but that's just my opinion), but it is certainly the reason why, say, Nike brought Colin Kaepernick on board. It's why every big company nowadays trips over itself to boost "Pride," when, within living memory of people posting in this very thread, the President of the United States treated AIDS deaths as a punchline (incidentally, Pride also emerged from a violent riot). "The wealthiest people of your society" collectively have no interest at heart except the preservation and continued growth of their wealth. You are right that this is class warfare, but you are totally misunderstanding which side of the war the police are on.
You are living in such an era right this very moment. And all due respect, but I don't super expect denizens of the land of Zwarte Piet to have the most nuanced views on race relations. When I was a student at Utrecht University, I had a professor insist that Piet isn't racist because, well, there wasn't really a reason, he just isn't, which, lol. As a white person, I have no real trouble existing in Europe (or anywhere else, for that matter), so I don't have any personal experience with European racism. I've heard it said by black Americans who have lived there that casual racism is ubiquitous, but that they generally don't sense the sort of raw hate underlying it that they get from many white Americans. So there's that, I guess (maybe that's what my professor really meant when she claimed that Piet wasn't racist). I once rented a room from a Portuguese guy who would talk about the sort of treatment he received in Germany, though, from Germans who saw his darker complexion and assumed he was Turkish. Race is a problem everywhere. If you don't see it, you are part of the problem. I don't mean this as an attack. I think in general we need to be more understanding of the fact that people don't know something until they've learned it, that white privilege is a thing that is, by design, basically invisible to white people until we are made aware of it, so I don't attribute any malice to your "all lives matter," "focusing on skin color is counterproductive," etc statements, but I think you ought to do some reading and educate yourself.
People still believe this, even after cases in which black people who unequivocally "respected law enforcement and their authority" were still killed?
You completely misunderstand how race and racism color how people see the world and affect their actions in both obvious and subtle ways. You seem to conceive of racism as an overt mindset and intentional acts. It is much more than that. You should think of racism not as some kind of affirmative belief system, although in extreme cases it can be that too. Rather, it is more like a miasma that we all inhabit, even despite our best intentions. The people who are outright white supremacists are relatively few, yet racist outcomes still pervade our society: see, for instance, studies showing that when identical resumes are submitted for the same job opening under a stereotypically "white" name and a stereotypically "black" name, the "white" resume gets substantially more callbacks; or studies showing that a significant number of doctors hold unscientific beliefs about black skin being thicker and tougher than white skin; or, yes, the fact that police in this country kill people a lot more often than police in other countries, and they are disproportionately killing black people. Am I a psychic who can look into Gauvin's mind to know what he was consciously thinking in that moment? No. Have I seen evidence that he was shouting racial epithets or explaining that he was going to kill George Floyd for being black? No. Can I read between the lines? Yes. To call it an "opinion" that George Floyd was killed for being black is meant to rob the statement of the force of truth by suggesting that there is no definitive answer here and that reasonable minds can differ and c'est la vie. But the ambiguity or lack of "evidence" that you are talking about doesn't really speak to whether this is a "fact" vs an "opinion," it just raises questions of probability and apportioning blame across multiple potential causes (I don't know what those other causes are, but I welcome you to raise them if you feel like it). Like, was George Floyd killed 100% because he was black? Or 70% because he was black and 30% because of some other reason? Or 60% because he was black and 25% because of some other reason and 15% because of some third reason? I must admit that I don't know, but more importantly, I also don't care, because these kinds of abstract questions only serve to obscure the point anyway. To posit that his death was 0% because he was black seems to me like it would be very difficult to coherently and honestly defend. Moreover, I don't think it ultimately matters. George Floyd represents the straw that broke the camel's back this time, but people are not demonstrating over one man's death, they're demonstrating over countless deaths and over a century and a half of second-class citizenship that was preceded by centuries more of slavery and all the crimes that have been committed to build and maintain white supremacy that have never been redressed. To say that we can't know that George Floyd was killed because he was black, even if true, would still be well beside the point.
The point of hiring more social workers is to prevent a robbery or shooting from happening in the first place. Crime is not some inexplicable law of nature. Crime has causes. The goal of hiring more social workers (and, it should be added, properly funding their work) is to address those root causes. Policing is, by its nature, reactionary. That the knee-jerk reaction to defunding police and reallocating those funds elsewhere is "but what about all the crime?" is not really a strong argument against defunding, it is just evidence of a profound lack of imagination. Your brother called the cops because that is the system we live under now. If someone broke into my house right now, I would also call the cops, because that is the best option currently available to me. But we can build a better world with better options.
Again, this is a lack of imagination. The idea is not to build "a police force of social workers," but to replace police with an array of better solutions, including, but not limited to, social workers (who would, as mentioned above, also need to be adequately funded, which is generally not currently the case and is probably the reason you are not able to reach your social worker).
The law recognizes a right to self-defense, including a right to meet deadly force with deadly force. But if you kill somebody who is not a threat to your life, then yes, you should be prosecuted for that. |
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yuricon
 Posts: 145 |
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One of the consistently frustrating things about corporate messages is that companies will say "we support" but then fail to offer support.
While you're highlighting black community members and creators, please also remember to give work to those black writers and bloggers and vloggers and podcasters. There are a lot of voices who aren't heard regularly. Thank you for your efforts in this regard and I look forward to seeing what ANN does in the future. |
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Tempest
 I Run this place.ANN Publisher  Posts: 10426 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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I encourage anyone, on either side of the arguement, who is discussing abolition of police to read the researched and professional explanations of how that might work.
No one is calling for a situation where social workers are sent to deal with dangerous crimes in progress. No one is calling for the overnight abolition of police forces (no one with any brains at least). I do not personally support the #AbolishPolice movement. I think it's unrealistic. But I think a huge amout of the ideas that have been proposed by the movement are very attainable. The gradual shifting of budget form over-militarized police forces to social programs designed to address as many of the root causes of crime as possible. As pointed out earlier, https://www.mpd150.com/ is a good resource. If you Google "abolish the police," you'll find a variety of pragmatic explanations as to how this would actually work, as opposed to reactionarry and uneducated "who will you call if... ?" statements. |
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Tempest
I Run this place. ANN Publisher Posts: 10426 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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Moderation Note:
Hi all, This hasn't gotten out of hand yet (thank you), but I'm very concerned that it will decend into cyclical arguement at some point. Regardless of your position, I would like you to consider simply not replying to anyone who isn't showing any sign of understanding your position. There's no need to "get the last word in," and even if you do, it doesn't mean you won or were right. And if you are replying to someone, please make sure you aren't saying something that has already been said. -T @Beholder252, I removed one of your comments because you either didn't properly read the other posters post, or you intentionally mischaracterized it. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, and you are more than welcome to rewrite that post with a reply that doesn't mischaracterize the original statement. If you need a copy of your original post for reference, PM me. |
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FireChick
Subscriber Posts: 2408 Location: United States |
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That's not entirely true. From what I've read, Floyd was using counterfeit money. That being said, if the police are going to handle someone who committed a crime, they need to make sure the punishment fits the crime. There's no sense in outright murdering someone over something as petty as using fake money, or for any reason at all for that matter. |
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Sir Winston C'thulhu
Posts: 32 |
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To be fair, I personally never stated to want to abolish the police, but rather to defund them. They don't need f***ing tanks, landmines, and US Army surplus gear when there's a protest going on. They're there to protect and serve, not search and destroy. And this is just my theory/opinion, but a lot of it has to do with the psychology of it all once they get their hands on new toys. Having all that crap, and such available access to it, emboldens them to do whatever they want without fear of repercussions. And by acting on it, they feel they're sending a message that they don't enforce the law, they are the law. By defunding the shit out of them and only giving them access to the basic essentials of law enforcement, I feel would bring them down to reality. It won't stop the rampant racism, but it WILL put a cork on the god mentality which is certainly a step forward in putting a damper on them feeling they can get away with everything. Just TODAY, another innocent black man was arrested - and had his neck knee-locked, right here in Florida. On camera. For the whole world to see. Clearly, despite the protests and backlash, the police don't feel any pressure whatsoever to start giving a shit, let alone change anything. When a kid misbehaves, you take their toys away. It's time the police started getting theirs taken away. |
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