Police arresting/attacking reporters covering protests/riots (1 Viewer)

[SystemShock]

There are plenty of videos like the one below circulating... 1st Amendment be damned.

[Mod Edit due to inflammatory partisan comments]

A bit surprised this hadn't made it here.

 

[FullMonte]

shirt. That is terrible to look at.

So true....and yet it should be a full page photo on the front page of every newspaper, and on screen during the entirety of every single news broadcast.

 

[MT15]

I think the act is heinous on its own merits, but I also think the brutality and gratuitous cruelty make it worse.

 

[insidejob]

I think the act is heinous on its own merits, but I also think the brutality and gratuitous cruelty make it worse.

Especially since it was done ONLY in the name of Trump filming a commercial looking tough walking over to the church to wave a Bible in the air for his photo op. He can't implode soon enough.

 

[insidejob]

Got this via newsletter to my inbox, but it's published online as well.

I think everyone should give this a read.

Where did policing go wrong?

Crime has been down for decades, but incarceration is still sky-high and brutality cases keep tearing the country apart. Does policing in America need a fundamental re-think?

taibbi.substack.com

Watching all the terrible news in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, it’s been hard not to think about Eric Garner. The cases have so many similarities. Once again, an unarmed African-American man in his forties has been asphyxiated in broad daylight by a police officer with a history of abuse complaints. He and his fellow officers ignore cries of “I can’t breathe,” and keep subduing their target even after he stops moving, unconcerned that he’s being filmed.

Five years ago, while sketching the outline for a book about the Garner case called I Can’t Breathe, my editor suggested I take on a larger question.

Why, he asked, do we even have police? After all, the history of policing in our country, especially as it pertains to minority neighborhoods, has always rested upon dubious justifications. The early American police forces evolved out of slave patrols in the South, and “progressed” to enforce the Black Codes from the Civil War period and beyond, on to Jim Crow through the late sixties if not longer.

In an explicit way, American policing has almost always been concerned on some level with enforcing racial separatism. Because Jim Crow police were upholding a way of life, the actual laws they were given to enforce were deliberately vague, designed to be easily used as pretexts for controlling the movements of black people. They were charged with punishing “idleness” or “impudence,” and encouraged to enforce a range of vagrancy laws, including such offenses as “rambling without a job” and “leading an idle, profligate, or immoral course of life.”

I ended up not taking on that question, focusing on the hard-enough question of what had led two young, amped-up policemen to choke the life out of a harmless father and street character like Garner. I was more interested in those police than all police, and part of me – the white part, probably – thought the answer to the question of why we need police at all was at least somewhat self-evident.

But the Garner story ended up graphically revealing the way modern “Broken Windows” policing had evolved to fit the tactics of those centuries of racial enforcement. I learned that “vagrancy” laws had been replaced in cities like New York with essentially identical offenses like “obstructing pedestrian traffic” and “obstructing government administration.”

In Staten Island, a borough that to this day remains very segregated – white and black residents alike refer to the Staten Island Expressway that bisects black neighborhoods to the north and white neighborhoods to the south as the “Mason-Dixon line” – the young black men who lived in and around the Tompkinsville area where Garner was killed told stories of being stopped and ticketed whenever they crossed into the wrong neighborhoods.

 

[The moose]

Got this via newsletter to my inbox, but it's published online as well.

I think everyone should give this a read.

Where did policing go wrong?

Crime has been down for decades, but incarceration is still sky-high and brutality cases keep tearing the country apart. Does policing in America need a fundamental re-think?

taibbi.substack.com

Great read.

The way people are policed is and has always been about attacking the working class.



It is about draining the working poor and even worse the straight up poor.

Then when your poor now has a record employment options dry up. It is a never ending circle that needs to be broken.

Incarcerated for profit needs to stop.

 

[insidejob]

Incarcerated for profit needs to stop.

This would be a huge start. I got a felony on my record in my early 20's and when business was slow at my real job (that I had to get licensed by the state to perform - which took jumping through some very expensive and time consuming hoops) I applied to drive for Uber and was turned down because of my 15 year old record.

The state trusts me with the public's money but Uber doesn't trust me to drive people across town in a job where no money changes hands.

 

[Ayo]

Yes, policing needs a re-conceptualization. We are moving in that direction in penality and incarceration. And sentencing disparities.

Policing was certainly going to be the next domino to fall.

But, based on personal experience, they will be the most intransigent.

I would suggest looking into what happened in Camden, NJ when they sought to fix the police force. And they did it to fix crime. Over policing wasn't actually fixing anything - it rarely does. And what's gained in one area usually means something is lost in another.

Anyway, in 2013, they disbanded the police force and rebuilt it.

What Happened to Crime in Camden?

Often ranked as one of the deadliest cities in America, Camden, New Jersey, ended 2017 with its lowest homicide rate since the 1980s.

www.citylab.com

there's a different way to do it

I don't know how anyone can look at how we are doing it and think there isn't a radically and better different way

 

[wardorican]

So, since this is all we have, I guess, discussing the protests/riots on this site, I'm going to throw this here.

Mildly amusing, but it's a great scene.