N.Y.P.D. Says It Used Restraint During Protests. Here’s What the Videos Show
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's right there in the article, after you scroll past all the videos. Many of these videos are totally missing their context. Here in Chicago, I saw police force a woman to the concrete as she was screaming ... after she threw something into a police cruiser that set it on fire.
Why did we see so much more violence from these protests than we've ever seen before? Part of it is COVID and the anxiety from being bottle up and out of work, but part of it is also the normalization of the masks:
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/secondary-effects/#masks-...
Since you seem to a stickler for "proportional violence", would you be ok if the cop just located the suspects car and firebombed it? I mean, that's proportional, no?
Edit: Not to mention this is perhaps moot to the broader argument, as this behavior from the police only requires very few repeating instances to be extremely destructive to society, and cherry-picking cases where the victim arguably "deserved" it has no effect on the impact of the other cases.
There has been so much argument on the lines of "It's just property."
I guess "They're just laws," as if they don't mean anything; as if laws were not the way we evolved socially to protect individuals from other individuals who wanted to cause harm.
She set a car on fire! That is literally violence. It's literally destruction. Saying "oh, it's a thing and not a person" doesn't hold a candle stick to the fact that it is still literally violence!
Words are literally not violence. Speech is literally not violence. Silence is literally not violence.
Setting things on fire, that you don't own, destructively, is violence. I can't believe 2020 is the year in which we have no idea what terms like "violence" and "non-violence" have literally meant for decades if not centuries.
Orwell had a term for this. It was called Double-Think.
So if a group decided to plan explosives and demolish a empty government building, you'd be like "come on, buildings have no feelings, leave them be"?
I'm referring to violence against people, not objects.
>Words are literally not violence. Speech is literally not violence. Silence is literally not violence.
I never said any of this, nor do I generally agree with any of it.
>Orwell had a term for this. It was called Double-Think.
I think these kinds of extreme us-vs-them strawmen are far more damaging, cruel, and thoughtless than the bad usages of the "it's just property" argument you're referring to are.
And to be clear, my entire post was in reference to the specific claim that destroying a police cruiser is automatically grounds for using violence against a person - for all I know about the example in question, her behavior on whole may have warranted the level of violence she received, but it's a ridiculous and anti-human opinion to default to.
I don't know, but if I was a police officer on the scene my first instinct wouldn't be a thorough inspection of the car to see if anyone was in there, it would be to make sure that woman doesn't do it again. I don't want to risk another firebomb.
> Was the woman armed
Was the firebomb not enough? Clearly she was armed with that. She may have more. Again, if I'm the police officer on the scene I don't know this and I don't want to take any risks. Secure the assailant first, sort things out later.
> Was she literally any sort of physical threat to the officer or officers who threw her to the ground? Yes. The threat of serious bodily injury from burns. In that moment there is no way of telling what else may be up this person's sleeve. She has already shown that she indents to cause serious damage with little regard for potential collateral damage.
So I too may be a super facist, but I'm totally OK with urgently and immediately taking the woman down.
I agree, though I would never make such subjective judgments as to the difference between necessary and unnecessary force without seeing a video.
>I too may be a super facist
This preemptive underdogging attack on people who disagree with you disguised as a self-defense is a huge red flag that you don't have personal conviction behind what you're saying.
Your way of thinking is what's given us roving, armed bands of state-sanctioned thugs who close ranks when confronted with wrongdoing, rather than public servants who are there to serve and protect.
It asserts "facts", like the false statement that wearing a mask lowers blood oxygen concentration by 20%, using citations of Facebook videos and conspiracy theory "news" websites as sources.
http://scielo.isciii.es/pdf/neuro/v19n2/3.pdf
Some rebuttals on the current concerns I've seen are just some doctors on their own doing a self-test (under god knows what standards and not peer reviewed).
From the transition from British royal subjects to US citizens, some of the "subjects" part stuck...
Lies
Damn lies
Statistics
Selectively chosen video snippets
"Lies" implies there's an intent to deceive, but most of these cases the reason why the rest of the footage isn't available is because people only start recording when things go south, so everything leading up to the event inevitably gets left out. That's very different than "Selectively chosen video snippets", which imply that somewhere there's footage of the whole incident, but anti-police activists are editing the footage to generate maximum outrage. It also doesn't help that some police officers think that recording is an act of aggression, further making the footage harder to acquire.
Watch for yourself. Decide where you think the truth lies. I think I could videotape just about any street fight and selectively choose when and for how long to show a clip to fit an agenda....
Capital "T" truth does not lie solely in a video clip. Just as with _literally everything_ online and everything digital, we need to be good _consumers_.
In the case of the George Floyd killing the is a witness video (over 10 minutes), security camera video (over 5 minutes), plus officer body camera. These of course have POV issues, audio issues which need to be considered. Despite these defects, there is the narrative of Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd's neck for over 8 minutes, which is evidence of the cause of Mr Floyd's death.
I have yet to read any comments here which take seriously how this firehose of brutality videos should be consumed--let alone making _any_ decisions about "truth".
When I was a young adult, the biggest issue concerning the internet was the potential danger of anonymous people online. Post Facebook, the danger was putting something online now, that you'll regret later.
Today, impact of the videos from the George Floyd killing is enormous.
What about the next video? I would like to hear more about thoughts on consuming videos, and presumed truth of any video.
And watching just some of those videos was sickening. All of this violence is sickening.
This is "restrained" by their standards.