Police & protestors — conflicting images

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  • June 3, 2020 at 7:45 pm #115816
    Avatar photozn
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    Police rioted this weekend, justifying the point of the protests

    https://www.businessinsider.com/police-rioted-george-floyd-riots-justifying-protests-2020-6?fbclid=IwAR2hjxDqFg7CWekVLyU7QgUd7Ht_06JdZBJ6E4g5U5hwiTPnMJ2JCZLcf2w

    In cities across America over the past several days, many police officers rioted.

    Wanton acts of violence were committed. Rights were callously violated. The rule of law was abandoned.

    To be sure, there were plenty of good and noble acts by the police over the weekend. Some police chiefs marched peacefully with protesters; others made it a point to directly engage in dialogue with their community. Countless officers protected innocent people and their property and also did their best to ensure as safe an environment as possible for peaceful protesters.

    No cops deserved to be attacked with projectiles. This shouldn’t be controversial.

    The violence and property damage associated with the civil unrest are inexcusable. The looting is indefensible. Both do incredible damage to any cause seeking justice, especially ones fighting to end police brutality and reform the criminal-justice system.

    None of that makes analyzing the events of the past few days, the underlying causes, and the motivations of the participants any easier. Far from a binary good-versus-bad determination, there are myriad issues to unpack. But any conversation focused only on the riots and looting and not law enforcement’s penchant for excessive force and institutional resistance to accountability is both disingenuous and unserious.

    For the moment, I’m going to focus on the institutional rot at the heart of policing in this country, in which the privileges afforded to law-enforcement officers allow them to break the law, abuse their authority, and hurt innocent people.

    These privileges are codified into police-union contracts with governments and backed up by the conservative interpretation of an 1871 law known as Section 1983.

    Under the interpretation, which protects police officers from facing liability in civil courts for violating citizens’ civil rights, those who feel their rights have been violated by a police officer need to prove that a nearly identical situation was ruled a violation of civil rights in the same jurisdiction for the courts to even consider revoking so-called qualified immunity from the officer accused.

    Police rioted

    In Minneapolis — the city where the nationwide unrest was sparked by the killing of George Floyd, a black man who died May 25 after Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, knelt on his neck for over eight excruciating minutes — members of the police and the National Guard marched through a quiet neighborhood as if it were Fallujah in 2004.

    The militarized police barked orders at citizens, commanding them to go back into their homes. Even though the city’s curfew specifically allowed for residents to be outside on their own property, one officer took a look at a small group of women on a front porch and said, “Light ’em up,” before one of his colleagues fired paint canisters at them.

    They were on their front porch. They were observing curfew rules. The cops were the lawbreakers.

    Another Minneapolis officer performed a drive-by pepper-spraying of peaceful protesters and media members in broad daylight.

    As violence erupted in at least two dozen US cities, some of the worst instincts of law enforcement were on display.

    In Louisville, Kentucky, the police seized and destroyed a substantial amount of bottled water being used for the relief of peaceful protesters.

    In Salt Lake City, an armored police officer who had no crowd to disperse still felt compelled to walk directly toward an elderly man with a cane and shove him to the ground.

    In New York, two New York City Police Department vehicles plowed through a barricade and into a crowd of protesters. A young man with his hands in the air had his mask pulled down by an NYPD officer, who then pepper-sprayed him at point-blank range. And in at least one attempt at crowd clearance, officers manhandled and assaulted anyone in their way.

    In Charleston, South Carolina, a young man among a group of kneeling protesters gave a tearful speech at the armored cops opposite them. After he pleaded with their humanity, even telling the cops he loved them, a group of officers charged toward the protesters and pulled the speaker into custody. He was arrested while peacefully protesting and exercising his freedom speech.

    Police officers can often face mortal danger and extreme stress in their line of work. But with the government-sanctioned power to deprive citizens of both life and liberty, they are required to swear an oath that they will be responsible, honest, and lawful in the use of such power.

    Police officers, by and large, try to uphold that oath. But police unions and many police departments do everything in their power to make that oath empty words by fighting any legitimate attempts at transparency and accountability when it comes to the use of force.

    This has needed to change for decades. Now could be the moment it must.

    The Supreme Court should squash ‘qualified immunity’ once and for all

    Floyd’s death won’t be in vain if it leads to the Supreme Court finally doing away with the “qualified immunity” interpretation of Section 1983 of the US Code — which essentially provides cover to keep officers from being held accountable in civil courts for violating citizens’ civil rights.

    Clark Neily, the vice president of criminal justice at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, wrote in The Bulwark that the general conservative interpretation of Section 1983 was a rare — and I’d say cynically hypocritical — instance of the right abandoning its “originalist” approach to the Constitution.

    As Neily puts it, victims of police violence have little recourse in the court system “unless they can find a preexisting case in the jurisdiction with nearly identical facts” to their own incident. That puts the onus on victims to prove their rights were actually violated, because a basic interpretation of the Constitution won’t do.

    Floyd’s family would essentially have to find a case in which a cop killed someone by kneeling on his or her neck for an obscene length of time to get Chauvin’s qualified immunity waived. The fact Chauvin had at least 18 complaints against him alleging abuse and inappropriate behavior doesn’t factor into the equation.

    Originalists have to contort themselves into pretzels to interpret the statute’s language so it gives law enforcement the exclusive benefit of the doubt in nearly every instance. Essentially, many constitutional conservatives believe in limiting government authority as much as possible, except when it comes to holding the police accountable for abusing their authority. And for now, the courts have backed that interpretation.

    Floyd’s killing could change that.

    The Supreme Court has the opportunity this week to decide to take on any of the dozens of cases challenging the qualified-immunity interpretation.

    But that’s not the only systemic issue preventing any meaningful reforms of police accountability.

    Police unions all over the country have negotiated into their contracts all kinds of inappropriate and unjust protections from facing justice for their actions.

    The Black Lives Matter-associated group Campaign Zero created a valuable database of police-union contracts that shows “72 of the 81 cities’ contracts imposed at least one barrier to holding police accountable.”

    Some of these include a grace period of up to several days after a fatal police-involved shooting before an officer can be interviewed. Others essentially keep disciplinary records from public view permanently.

    And then there’s the fact that in this country, it is disturbingly easy for a police officer fired for abuse, corruption, or other causes to find another job in law enforcement. In some states, it’s harder to get a license to braid hair than it is to be certified as an armed agent of the state.

    Thanks to a confluence of public-sector union power, a federalist system of government, and the unwillingness of many local and state governments to keep and share databases containing the names of bad cops who have been fired for cause, bad cops keep working.

    Policing isn’t a basketball game

    According to Teresa Nelson, the ACLU of Minnesota’s legal director, the Minneapolis police union’s boss, Lt. Bob Kroll, told her in 2015 that he saw complaints against officers as similar to fouls in basketball.

    “If you’re not getting any fouls, you’re not working hard enough,” Nelson says Kroll told her, as reported in The New York Times.

    Chauvin had at least 18 complaints. That’s enough to foul out of three NBA games.

    Kroll, according to public records, has had at least 29 complaints made against him.

    Lest it needed to be said, policing is not a game, and accusations of abuse are not basketball fouls. Policing, when done incorrectly, destroys life and liberty.

    Such a cavalier attitude about the community’s relationship with the police, and the offensively dismissive view of the need for accountability, is a major part of the reason these protests are happening.

    Throw in all the incidents of heavy-handed to outright criminal behavior by law enforcement during this terrible weekend in American history, and it’s clear that change is needed.

    When the dust settles, we don’t need a “law and order” bootheel to make things better; we need the political will to demand that the law-enforcement community reform itself away from its occupying-army posture and make its disciplinary records transparent to the public.

    If the police won’t reform on their own, we need to summon the political will to fight the police unions — protected by Democrats’ reflexive pro-union posture and Republicans’ knee-jerk fealty to armed authority — and defend the civil liberties of Americans.

    June 3, 2020 at 8:53 pm #115821
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    June 3, 2020 at 8:56 pm #115822
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    June 3, 2020 at 9:02 pm #115826
    Mackeyser
    Moderator

    Yeah, there’s so much going on in the Twittersphere that I have to take breaks.

    There are SO MANY fucking videos of cops just being fascist.

    The ONLY thing left for us to be be the same as Nazis is for the Dems to agree to suspend elections and give Trump complete powers.

    Pretty much, the rest is in place.

    Sports is the crucible of human virtue. The distillate remains are human vice.

    June 4, 2020 at 11:14 am #115852
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    June 4, 2020 at 3:59 pm #115858
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    Trump praised the Tiananmen crackdown when it happened. Trump in 1990: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength.” … A decent write-up on this: https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-praised-china-tiananmen-foreshadowing-response-to-george-floyd-protests-2020-6

    June 4, 2020 at 4:39 pm #115860
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    June 5, 2020 at 9:49 pm #115917
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    Just someone I know on Facebook.

    Stacy Alaimo

    As I watch this video of police brutality I am struck by the sharp contrast of police treatment of right wing agitators. At a recent demonstration to take down the confederate statues in Dallas, white supremacist militia were allowed to strut around with huge rifles and harass and bait and yell at all the anti-racist protestors. They were strutting around in downtown Dallas, fully armed, trying to provoke fights and the police let them do what they wanted.

    June 5, 2020 at 10:15 pm #115918
    Avatar photoInvaderRam
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    zn wrote:

    Just someone I know on Facebook.

    Stacy Alaimo

    As I watch this video of police brutality I am struck by the sharp contrast of police treatment of right wing agitators. At a recent demonstration to take down the confederate statues in Dallas, white supremacist militia were allowed to strut around with huge rifles and harass and bait and yell at all the anti-racist protestors. They were strutting around in downtown Dallas, fully armed, trying to provoke fights and the police let them do what they wanted.

    well. i don’t know about dallas. but the head of the minneapolis police union?

    bob kroll

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by Avatar photoInvaderRam.
    June 6, 2020 at 7:20 am #115935
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    June 6, 2020 at 11:36 am #115951
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    June 6, 2020 at 11:57 am #115952
    Avatar photoZooey
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    This week seems like a PR disaster for the police to me. But since feeds are all customized and targeted it’s hard to know what mainstream America is seeing. But…my goodness.

    June 6, 2020 at 12:13 pm #115953
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    Zooey wrote:

    This week seems like a PR disaster for the police to me. But since feeds are all customized and targeted it’s hard to know what mainstream America is seeing. But…my goodness.

    —————

    Yeah, mainstream-amerika is a very different, very populous planet.

    memes:https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/right-wing-groups-are-training-young-conservatives-to-win-the-next-meme-war/

    Benny Johnson took to the stage at the convention center in Palm Beach, Florida, before an audience of cheering young Trump supporters in December to lead a session titled “How to Own the Libs.”

    “I ask myself every day: How do we own the libs?” said Johnson, at the time a reporter for the right-wing Daily Caller. “How do we do it in a way that makes a difference? Because these people deserved to be wrecked.”

    According to Johnson, the answer to that question is memes. These bits of humor or political propaganda—generally images overlaid with a caption designed to go viral—are best known for littering social media, but some experts think they might have helped elect Donald Trump. Or as notorious internet troll Chuck Johnson has said, “We memed the president into existence.”

    Following that unexpected meme-driven success, well-funded conservative groups are making a more organized push to train young internet-savvy right-wingers in the art of meme-making, enlisting a growing army in what they see as the coming meme war of 2020.

    Turning Point USA, the conservative campus group that organized the conference, is merely one of these organizations seeking to sway hearts, minds, and elections via meme trainings. And it’s clear that when it comes to political memes, the left—which has never taken them very seriously—is trailing the right badly, and falling even further behind.

    “Right-wing speaker training has been around for decades,” says Angelo Carusone, president of the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters, which did a study of Facebook memes last summer. “Memes are a new front in the asymmetry. What you’re looking at here with memes is storytelling around the bend, and what you’re seeing is the future.”…

    ….Giesea has long argued that memes are such a powerful tool they should be used as cyberwarfare to combat propaganda from ISIS and other foreign threats. In 2015, he wrote in a NATO journal on information warfare that “it seems obvious that more aggressive communication tactics and broader warfare through trolling and memes is a necessary, inexpensive, and easy way to help destroy the appeal and morale of our common enemies…Memetic warfare is about taking control of the dialogue, narrative, and psychological space. It’s about denigrating, disrupting, and subverting the enemy’s effort to do the same.”

    The same could be said of memes in politics. Cheap, subversive, and designed to provoke an emotional response, memes are a disruptive form of information guerrilla warfare. Republicans have gotten Giesea’s message, while Democrats have all but ignored it.

    June 6, 2020 at 12:48 pm #115956
    Avatar photoBilly_T
    Participant

    Admittedly, this is purely anecdotal, but I think it captures the larger “victory” of right-wing messaging.

    I have a family member who truly can’t stand Trump. She finds him despicable. But she also sees “antifa” as a huge threat, and guilty of (supposedly) heinous, violent acts. She pays close attention to certain twitter feeds, and they’ve convinced her of this. They’ve even convinced her that they’re using “military tactics,” even though that exact term was foisted on Americans by Trump, Barr and the Trump administration. It came from the people she despises, but she believes it, not knowing its origins.

    As in, even among people who are directly opposed to Trump, his policies, his endless cruelties and lies, his divisiveness, etc. etc. . . . his/their memes, messaging, innuendos, retweets of far-right lies, works. They buy into much of it without realizing where it comes from. As in, it comes FROM Trump, but they don’t see this.

    I tried to explain to her that “antifa” is an idea, not an organization. That it may have hundreds of “members,” in total, whereas the far-right has millions, but she’s so upset by what she thinks they are, she won’t listen.

    (More on this below . . .)

    June 6, 2020 at 12:59 pm #115957
    Avatar photoBilly_T
    Participant

    Whenever I post links, it always seems to trigger the spam filter, so I’ll leave them out for now.

    But in recent days, I’ve read several articles about how Trump and his administration have pretty much gone full-on fascist. I’m guessing you guys already know all of this . . . but they put unidentified, heavily militarized, basically secret police in the streets, who won’t say where they come from. His personal soldiers, basically, under the direction of Barr. And, while this has been going on, protesters have been arrested (ten to twenty thousand and counting) and interrogated by the FBI and “police intelligence,” demanding to know political affiliations, which is illegal. Boiled down, this war on black and brown people is also a war on leftists, and “antifa” is being used as a catch-all umbrella, with obviously incredibly dangerous potential. McCarthyist and beyond.

    Which leads me to think yet again about the focus of all too many leftists with audiences and bullhorns. Is this really the time to spend 99% of their shows telling us what we leftists already know? That the Dem power-structure is corporatist? That corporatism is bad? That far too many Dems are sellouts?

    As the young kids used to say, “Duh.” Tell us something we didn’t already know.

    Better yet, why not focus their time on an existential threat of making leftist thought in America punishable by jail time and worse? Which is where this is heading. If Trump, Barr, white supremacist militias, the alt-right, Talk Radio, et al have their way . . . that’s what we’ll have: the American left being illegal, full stop.

    June 6, 2020 at 2:06 pm #115961
    Avatar photowv
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    Billy_T wrote:

    Admittedly, this is purely anecdotal, but I think it captures the larger “victory” of right-wing messaging.

    I have a family member who truly can’t stand Trump. She finds him despicable. But she also sees “antifa” as a huge threat…)

    ====================

    Yeah, you know how that all works. The system/media loves play the false-equivalence game. ‘Balance’ and all.
    “Extremists” are bad no matter what their beliefs — even if they are fighting against fascism. Idiocracy.

    w
    v

    June 6, 2020 at 3:31 pm #115967
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    June 6, 2020 at 7:08 pm #115980
    Avatar photoBilly_T
    Participant
    wv wrote:
    Billy_T wrote:

    Admittedly, this is purely anecdotal, but I think it captures the larger “victory” of right-wing messaging.

    I have a family member who truly can’t stand Trump. She finds him despicable. But she also sees “antifa” as a huge threat…)

    ====================

    Yeah, you know how that all works. The system/media loves play the false-equivalence game. ‘Balance’ and all.
    “Extremists” are bad no matter what their beliefs — even if they are fighting against fascism. Idiocracy.

    w
    v

    Oddly enough, though this may be only temporary, a lot of the MSM seem to be relatively supportive of the protests at the moment. It’s actually kinda shocking. The WaPo, MSNBC and CNN, for example, seem to pushing back against the lies about “antifa,” and their commentators routinely now say the vast majority of protesters are peaceful. They almost sound like actual journalists, whose job should be, at all times, speaking truth to power, exposing injustice, abuse, oppression, etc. It’s almost as if they found their conscience as a profession.

    I’ve even seen military folks on the teebee talking about how dangerous it is for Trump to want the military to control our cities, that the military should never be put into that position, etc. etc.

    Boiled down, Trump has managed to unite the Press in a way he can’t have intended. Despite his endless bullying, lying, attempts at intimidation, they seem far less the lapdogs they were in the past, under Obama, Bush, and further back.

    Will this hold once Trump is gone? Will they build on this change and start to hold everyone in power accountable, for the first time in American history?

    Hope all is well, WV . . . and the rest of youze guys.

    June 6, 2020 at 9:34 pm #115988
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    =

    June 6, 2020 at 10:05 pm #115989
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    June 6, 2020 at 11:57 pm #115990
    Avatar photoInvaderRam
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    i still say that for the most part protesters were peaceful.

    i don’t wanna speculate on who started what or who escalated what. but most of the protesters were peaceful. it was so disheartening to see all the violence going on.

    hopefully, the protesting continues without interruption.

    June 7, 2020 at 12:15 pm #116002
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    InvaderRam wrote:

    i still say that for the most part protesters were peaceful.

    Oh absolutely, there can be no question of that. As of yesterday there were protests in 650 different towns and cities (in all 50 states) and the percentage of them that were violent in any way shape or form was small. And in the cases where they were violent, most of that was initiated by the police.

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    June 7, 2020 at 2:41 pm #116006
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    June 7, 2020 at 7:41 pm #116012
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    Paul Musgrave@profmusgrave
    Protesters Say Statue Tripped, Fell Into Water

    June 8, 2020 at 5:13 pm #116080
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    June 8, 2020 at 9:02 pm #116084
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    Lee J. Carter@carterforva
    I really don’t think people are grasping the reality that a car running into a crowd was a once-in-a-lifetime event 3 years ago and now it’s happening like 4 times a day, sometimes done by police themselves.

    June 9, 2020 at 10:26 am #116101
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    June 9, 2020 at 11:53 am #116108
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    June 9, 2020 at 12:01 pm #116110
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    June 9, 2020 at 2:02 pm #116117
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    standing rock:https://www.thedailybeast.com/standing-rock-protester-shot-in-face-with-tear-gas-canister-may-go-blind
    Standing Rock Protester Shot in Face With Tear Gas Canister May Go Blind
    SAVAGE

    Vanessa Dundon and others are suing North Dakota police for the brutal crackdown last month that they say began when they tried to clear the way for ambulances.

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