Hundreds of videos have emerged of police brutality over the past few days. In how many of those videos do you see "good cops" taking down those bad cops committing acts of brutality?
Almost never. I myself have only seen two videos where this has been the case, out of hundreds!
Police racism and violence is an issue, but it becomes egregious when the rest of the police force just stands by.
Are there any videos or stories at all over the past few days?
There have been reports in some cities of the actual good cops here and there taking part in the protests and actually looking like they want to improve things in their communities, but I haven't heard of anything where the police have intervened on cops that were escalating violence and brutalizing protesters.
It would be a pretty big turning point in the protests if this is actually happening
There’s a video of a cop pushing a kneeling woman and then a black woman police officer yells at him for a little bit, that’s about it. I guess you could count the video of a Seattle cop telling another cop to take his knee off of a protester’s throat.
> I guess you could count the video of a Seattle cop telling another cop to take his knee off of a protester’s throat.
Yeah but that only happened after the crowd was screaming at them to take their knee off. I doubt that would have happened if it weren't for the protestors and the optics of doing literally exactly what kicked off this latest protest to begin with. If those cops were alone and making that arrest a month ago I highly doubt the other cop would have stepped in to move his knee.
You are arguing a completely different point than your parent/thread.
You are saying "there exist police departments which are friendly with the protesters".
The thread you are replying to isn't talking about protests; it's discussing the absence of evidence where police officers actively intervened and stopped the excessive use of force by a fellow officer.
In the USA, a civilian doesn't have the right to defend themselves from an officer under any circumstances in most states. A very few states allow you to shoot to defend yourself (even from officers who don't present themselves as officers) under very narrow circumstances. Any way you cut it, police are given benefit of the doubt when interacting with suspects but the cheaper internet-connected cameras get, the more evidence that we should probably revisit that long-held doctrine.
Yup, and then there's other videos of cops marching with protesters... Straight into the waiting arms of the national guard, where protesters get boxed in, shot at, and arrested.
The police in Columbus, Ohio marched with protesters earlier today, minutes ago they tear gassed legal media observers despite their plainly identifying themselves. Countless more examples. It’s PR.
The only one I've seen was where two cops were restraining someone while being filmed. One of the cops had his knee on the arrestee's head/neck, and after some time his partner (administering cuffs perhaps) noticed it and wrenched his knee away.
I think I saw that one; they took the knee away because it was on a white guy's neck, wasn't it? We've already seen what happens when it's a black guy's neck
In this case, the knee was there regardless and the colleague recognised the "bad optics" (as they say). Looked like natural behaviour from the first cop rather than "I'm trying to prove we kneel on all necks" too.
Probably because it was boilerplate. When people show up in threads with a pre-existing list of links, that's not conversation, that's talking-points. HN threads are supposed to be conversations.
Gotta love a three-hour old account trying to convince people that police racism and violence isn't real. Are we twitter now @dang? The astroturfing hasn't been subtle lately.
We've banned that account for breaking the site guidelines. But why are you breaking them yourself? Insinuations about astroturfing without evidence are not allowed, for reasons I've explained extensively (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). And obviously you shouldn't be responding like this or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23386438. Doing that helps nothing; it only makes this place even worse.
The guidelines specifically ask you not to feed egregious comments by replying (a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls), but to flag them instead. Other users did that, and so the GP comment was rightly flagkilled. If you had done that instead, that would have happened sooner.
I'll read them today. Apologies for making the forum worse, I'll try to change. I've been struggling with a lot of anger surrounding this issue lately. Maybe it'd be best if I took a break from HN for a while.
How did I break site guidelines? The comment I was replying to made wildly exaggerated claims about police violence and racism. I am simply trying to improve the quality of discussion by focusing on what the evidence actually allows us to conclude.
I understand that for controversial topics many people have deeply held beliefs and so experience a strong emotional reaction if they are questioned. It is easier to dismiss someone as a "troll" rather than examining why they hold these beliefs.
This was admittedly my lowest quality comment, but it is hard to see what was objectionable about the previous three comments, which were almost instantly flagged. The statistical evidence points to a very small role for racial bias in explaining differences in the use of deadly force by the police. What's wrong with pointing that out when it is directly relevant to the discussion?
