Ongoing U.S Police Brutality and Corruption Discussion Thread

I'm shocked, shocked, etc. The motives of TV news producers are impure? They're using sensationalism? Tell me more. Gee if only white America were as enlightened, they'd just know that cops were lying about stuff and we wouldn't need to see all this unpleasantness.

"Vietnam lost anyway" uh fine right, as if "losing" had any impact whatever on America continuing stupid unjust wars.

How about the next few wars over the next few decades. What do you think the military picked up from the history of Vietnam? Much more sanitized presentation with "embedded" reporters, correct? Any iconic imagery you can think of in the mainstream media of bodies, death - other than a few images of, naturally, Americans who were killed? At this point it is out of the political mainstream in either party to suggest that maybe it isn't just American deaths we should be worried about in these wars. I think it's because nobody in America has to see it any more.

But at least it wasn't upsetting to television viewers. You're right everybody, keep the trauma out of the living room, how dare anyone suggest there might be anything more important than viewer comfort zones.

http://binarydissent.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/strawman.jpg

Don't you think sensationalizing violence enables a violent system?

No, that's very fuzzy.

As for well-meaning people who come up with excuses for authoritarian violence, check out mainstream Democrats who decide to go along with administration drone killings because they know the president loves his children and is just doing his best to keep us safe.

VP, there's a time and place for that point to be made, but you have really misplaced it here IMHO. I also think you've seriously misread the objections raised by DJP and others - at the very least gotten the tone quite wrong.

Putting lots of violent images on TV every night vs. not putting lots of violent images on TV every night. Is that too fuzzy for you?

Just as the more a word is repeated it loses it's meaning.

Brings me back to last summer, Netanyahu: “They use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause.”

Netanyahu probably mainly worried about the corrosive effects of too much violence on TV. I expect to soon see various police chiefs in the US making the same argument.

The media is there to promote powered interests. They have a platform to say whatever they want.

just in point of historic fact i'm pretty sure the anti-lynching activists around the turn of the century thru the 1930s usually shied away from graphic descriptions or imagery regarding the lynchings, because they recognized that going too far in that direction didn't actually help their cause.

Guess I have to spell out sarcasm re: Netanyahu, that he was in charge of the killings and objected to the results being shown in the mass media, go figure.

I don't know enough about anti-lynching activists and the way they handled the issue of sensitivity, but on the question of the press I notice this one muckraker who earned the praise of W. E. B. Du Bois for his efforts (without necessarily being totally admirable either):

"Investigative reporter Ray Stannard Baker, the only muckraker who directed his journalistic energies to expose lynching (Beasley, 1982), described lynchings in detail in McClure's in 1905 and in a book, Following the Color Line, published in 1908. Although Baker made statements that are glaringly offensive by today's standards (e.g., a reference to the "animal-like ferocity" of Black criminals), his work helped call Americans' attention to racial problems and was praised by W.E.B. Du Bois (Beasley, 1982)."

from this: http://academic.csuohio.edu/perloffr/lynching/

keep digging

And yeah, I know I'm not making any friends tonight so I'll just close this out by saying that I think authoritarian violence, directed by the powerful against the powerless, is endemic and one kind isn't more excusable than another even though different people like to excuse different kinds, and saying 'oh let's only talk about cops right now' is a, wait for it, cop out.

Secondly, I'm hardly the only person to ever call for, uh, MORE upsetting violence in the media:

http://www.thenation.com/blog/173559/media-cover-iraq-war-images-sanitized-start

Peace (I guess I have to say I'm not being ironic?)

o wait one more thing saluting Hammer Smashed Bagels with the cool minimalism i.e. no arguments made, no arguments refuted, just nonstop Fonzie level charisma

I've said about as much as you with about 1/25th of the paragraphs

but y'know feel free to keep telling a Black man itt what he should and shouldn't find revolting in the media and go on 25 post screeds insinuating how he's part of the problem and that he's playing into the hands of the enemy. not condescending or dickish at all.

and there's the fact that you're deliberately misrepresenting what he said in the first place but w/e

there are people here whose family members have been lynched in living memory

perhaps give a thought to that when you, who have nothing at all at stake, call for, uh, more upsetting violence in the media

otm

I owe DJP an apology for my first post, the only post directed to DJP - it was disrespectful of me to make the comment personally directed.

Apology not accepted. Fuck you.

60 Minutes did a story on the sarin gas attacks in Syria that included images of people dying in the streets and in makeshift clinics, hacking their lungs out and twitching painfully, and rooms filled with piles of dead bodies. They presented this story with multiple warnings about the graphic imagery and well insulated/isolated from the rest of their program. The imagery was horrific, powerful and treated with respect.

The video of Walter Scott being gunned down was shown on a loop right after fucking Ellen with no preamble and no warning. It was then shown again as a teaser for the nightly news during Wheel of Fortune, again with no warning and no context other than "watch our story about this police officer shooting a fleeing black man later!"

Which of these do you think was meant to bring awareness to a horrible crime and which of these do you think was being marketed as lurid entertainment?

Fuck you.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDfc7dDVAAEJezW.jpg

Baltimore tonight.
(photo by @cmcampbell6)

drives me crazy that there's all this press re: Baltimore with headlines describing Gray as having been "hurt while in police custody" as opposed to, y'know, having been killed by police. cuz you know he may have inflicted that spinal injury on himself amirite smdh

stay safe Baltimore

Ugh, now people are tweeting out the address of the Baltimore mayor's house. This is so incredibly fucked up.

we've run out of firetrucks

Good read by Coates: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/nonviolence-as-compliance/391640/

Seeing a friend on Facebook post things like "Pray for law enforcement in Baltimore!" and "Voices protest, not fists" and I wonder why I am friends with *anybody*.

damn
"That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state."
http://ftw.usatoday.com/2015/04/orioles-john-angelos-baltimore-protests-mlb
that's quite the sentence!

So have you all read that old Baltimore Sun article on police brutality? http://data.baltimoresun.com/news/police-settlements/ One thing that all of a sudden I couldn't stop thinking about is this line about Robert F Cherry, president of the city's Fraternal Order of Police lodge, on why there are no consequences for the officers when a jury decides against them in cases of police brutality: He stressed that nobody can predict how a jury will decide cases. That is a police officer, who doesn't believe in the justice system. How can one live like that?

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/the-brutality-of-police-culture-in-baltimore/391158/

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/the-brutality-of-police-culture-in-baltimore/391158/

excerpt;

$5.7 million is the amount the city paid to victims of brutality between 2011 and 2014. And as huge as that figure is, the more staggering number in the article is this one: "Over the past four years, more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil-rights violations." What tiny percentage of the unjustly beaten win formal legal judgments?
If you're imagining that they were all men in their twenties, think again:
Victims include a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant accountant who had witnessed a beating, a 50-year-old woman selling church raffle tickets, a 65-year-old church deacon rolling a cigarette and an 87-year-old grandmother aiding her wounded grandson. Those cases detail a frightful human toll. Officers have battered dozens of residents who suffered broken bones — jaws, noses, arms, legs, ankles — head trauma, organ failure, and even death, coming during questionable arrests. Some residents were beaten while handcuffed; others were thrown to the pavement.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-gray-rough-rides-20150423-story.html#page=1

But Gray is not the first person to come out of a Baltimore police wagon with serious injuries.

Relatives of Dondi Johnson Sr., who was left a paraplegic after a 2005 police van ride, won a $7.4 million verdict against police officers. A year earlier, Jeffrey Alston was awarded $39 million by a jury after he became paralyzed from the neck down as the result of a van ride. Others have also received payouts after filing lawsuits.

david simon's statement -_-

http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/04/plain_clothes_cops_shoot_philly_pizza_delivery_guy_wearing_hoodie.html

Philippe Holland was heading back to his car Tuesday night after making his last stop for his pizza delivery job; he didn't have his pizza bag with him, Philly.com reports, because it had been a small order. So with his hoodie up and hands in his pockets he trekked back toward his car from the house when the two men—plainclothes officers—stopped him. What happened next is what Philadelphia police are saying may have been a misunderstanding.

Holland's car was riddled with bullets, three of which hit the 20-year-old in his neck, leg and head. He was left in critical condition at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

jesus fucking christ

As I understand it, they asked the male to stop. The male, in quick fashion, got in his car and he drove at a high rate of speed towards the officers. The officers then discharged out of fear for their lives," Deputy Police Commissioner Richard Ross told CBS 3

sad lol oh yeah that sounds likely. sounds like something from an 80s buddy cop movie

wtf

christ. so many holes in that story, just on its face. it's just a shitty lie, even for the top of person who nods their heads and believes the officers' account it doesn't even get them off the hook... like, what? these out-of-uniform officers were standing in the street, in front of the car? yelling at the guy through his windshield? at what point did they start brandishing their guns? but they're supposed to have stopped him (for no reason) in the space between a house and his car. so like, on the sidewalk. so when he got in the car, the officers leaped into the street? or into the parking space in front of this one? and he has a super-car that can leap from a dead stop to a "high rate of speed"? or the officers ran down the block a bit to give him some space to speed up? what?

i mean not news that officers make shit up. obviously. really obviously. but you expect at least a lie that they intend to embed in the interstices of "conflicting accounts" or "there were no witnesses," counting on the department not caring enough to ask questions. these assholes have carried out basically a mob hit, and they are so shameless as to try and cover it with some dog-ate-my-homework bullshit. or more correctly "killed while trying to escape" shit. which is also not new, at all. see darren wilson and a million others. i don't know why this aspect of the falsification is pissing me off as much or more than the rest of it. it's just so swaggeringly shameless. like "we know all that will happen is we get confined to desk duty so we can just make up whatever." fucking hell.

These pieces of shit lie like six-year-olds because their lies are held up to zero scrutiny by anyone who might do something about it.

^^^

they just make up some action movie shit with impunity and know they will get the benefit of the doubt

yeah that's what so infuriating, thank you both for getting at it more precisely and succinctly than i could.

The case of the grandmother running to help her bullet-ridden grandson and herself getting assaulted made me see red.

ftp imo

I spent a little too long thinking "what does file transfer protocol have to do with any of this"

^^^

Same! I usually go with ACAB but let's just agree to celebrate everyone's choices that delegitimize & convict actors of state violence.

haha yeah that took me a second

#ftp is EVERYWHERE today, lotta confused tech guys i'm sure