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About That George Floyd Death
I am watching some online streams from the “protests” in Minneapolis. The situation involves mounted police, buildings burning, teargas, and strike teams. You can call it a riot and this is the second night.
The people are upset about George Floyd being killed by police. The cops responded to alleged forging and George ended up face down on the ground with a cops knee on his neck. There is video that shows him begging for his life as succumbs. The cops have been fired and Trump has vowed a swift investigation. Protests are starting in other cities. Some rednecks are in a video “armed” up and looking to stop looting. This seems like a big deal as the country is on edge from the 60 days of house arrest. Add in record unemployment and who knows what is going to happen.
I am also listening to the police scanner. There are reports of shots fired and now the Dollar Tree is on fire. It is weird to see protesters wearing COVID masks.
This is a horrible problem as many Blacks feel like cops are an occupying force and we should all be sensitive to government oppression these days. Cities have set rules of engagement that allow these escalations and cities are going to have to fix things, because it is bad for the citizenry and bad for the police and bad for America.
Published in General
Please note that Minneapolis and Milwaukee are two different cities.
I could see attacking the police station and trashing cop cars, same with marching on city hall. Those are the people actually associated with the death, which looks bad.
How does that go to robbing auto-parts stores and Target? I guess they don’t care what they look like to other people. MLK was very clear on maintaining a clear message to the white people up in the north. They might be racist, but they likely wouldn’t like seeing women and children being threatened with dogs and blasted with firehoses.
Those middle states all look alike to us coastal elites, but I can tell them apart. The convention is in the cheese state and the riots are in the Spam state . . . but there sorta near each other, right?
They even play football for some kind of axe.
Won’t be done. Racial polarization is too hot since Obama stirred it up. That was a possible way to cool it off and he threw gasoline on the fire. I remember when Carter was elected and I consoled myself, thinking, “oh well. He has run a business.” Ha ! Then I thought electing Obama should purge the last suspicion of “systemic racism.”
Race relations are worse, at least in the north, than they were when I was a teen in the 1950s. When I was a senior in high school, my best friend and I used to hang out at a black tavern called “Ella Mae’sHideaway.” It was in south Chicago about 67th and South Chicago Avenue. My buddy had worked that summer on a beer truck as a helper and they thought we were 21. We would go in there on a Friday night, shoot bumper pool for beers (25 cents apiece), and everybody was drinking and gambling. We were very good at bumper pool. We never lost. Guys would line up to play us and we would leave about 1 AM never having bought a beer. I never ever felt unsafe. I would not dream of going to a place like that now.
The folks doing the looting aren’t doing it out of protest. They’re opportunists.
Maybe because Target and auto parts stores don’t fight/shoot back?
One might even say different states….
Edit:Never mind Vance beat me to it.
No, what Minneapolis needs is police procedures that don’t involve snuffing out the lives of people suspected of minor financial crimes. This was done slowly in the middle of the public place and onlookers were too terrified to intervene. Is your city any better? Would you think differently, if this was 1775 and some British Redcoats had their boot to the neck of Patrick Henry and snuffed him out in the middle of the street? Tyranny is tyranny and is not too be tolerated any time, any place.
Sort of. Cops follow their rules and their rules written by cities. The police unions negotiate, so they have maximum flexibility/safety and minimum culpability. But it is the politicians that face the voters and they are the ones that have the responsibility for ensuring the rights of the citizens are protected.
End result: police are liars who will always cover for each other and work against any of them being brought to justice. They are not here to serve or protect us, only themselves.
Everyone is out for themselves and no one else, in every institution on America.
I’ll defend him. I assume he was using city approved methods, so not his fault. The other cops implicitly approved his actions, so not his vault. The city leaders will be re-elected and won’t change any procedures, so blame the voters.
And that justifies destroying retail stores and putting people out of work? Don, the Roof Koreans defended their businesses from LA rioters. It was not a statement of support or opposition to the police – if anything, it is a statement that they cannot maintain order, so private citizens must defend their property.
I’m sure the Sons of Liberty would have put Boston to the torch over a dead patriot, as opposed to marching on the Redcoats.
To move this further along, how would you have responded? Walked up to them and told them to stop? Shoot the officer with his knee on the suspect? People obviously videotaped the situation and uploaded it all over, exposing the criminal conduct.
I would imagine you include yourself in that statement, right?
Not all of them
This is defining murderous behavior up. It’s buck passing to the exclusion of personal responsibility and I seriously doubt that squeezing someone’s neck for several minutes is “City approved.”
Thanks for saving me some typing, @omegapaladin
D’oh!
People say they’re two different cities, but have you ever seen them in the same room together?
I am not an institution. I spent 25 years in a service organizing, only to be booted out thanks to personal politics of what I am talking about.
I was naive enough to think my service counted and had value. It did not.
Name me an institution in this nation that is interested in its supposed mission.
Remember the months after 9/11, when people would stand on the street and applaud cops and firefighters?
Good times, good times.
Maine Warden Service.
Yeah, well, that was 2o years ago. We have a generation of new cops, and lots of footage if you care to look, of police out of control.
Really? What is that? Stopping people from enjoying parks?
I think that is the trend. This mindset is enabled by those who glorify the police and try to equate them with heroes or with the military. They aren’t the military. Even the military shouldn’t be put on that pedestal as there are lots of bad people in the military.
The military recruits from people all over the country from all walks of life and there are lots of a bad actors in the military.
But the military exists to defend the people. The police exist to control the people.
That’s a big difference. Police, as part of their job, dominate and control everyone in sight. Not all police are bad, most are in fact very good, but there’s no denying that the mindset of training to control everyone, and then actively practicing controlling all people everyday gives them a huge tendency to abuse the trust we put in them.
Rather than assume they are without sin, we should always demand strict accountability for every action and severe punishment if they step over the line. They should be paid well to avoid the temptation to be corrupt, they probably should have good benefits to encourage good people to join up, but we should never pretend that the near absolute power they have doesn’t tend to corrupt them.
The Maine Warden Service is “responsible for the enforcement of fisheries and wildlife laws, and the coordination of search and rescue in wilderness areas of the state. Maine’s game wardens strive to protect the state’s fishing and hunting resources, Enforcing strict limits on the activities listed above to keep animal populations stable. Maine’s Warden Service is operationally part of Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, it is the oldest conservation law enforcement agency in the United States.”
That’s from Wikipedia. I know that it is a highly respected agency in Maine. I commented on another post some time ago that a SSGT on my LE Flight wanted to join the Maine Warden Service when he got out. Since Maine is 80% forested or unclaimed land, the MWS is essential in that state.
I’m sure @GrannyDude will fill in more details.
Statistically, killings by cop are *way* down over the years – as they say in baseball, “you can look it up”, if you care to look.
The reason you have “lots of footage” is because everyone has a camera now. There could still be (I would argue *is*) less abuse by cops, but it would appear to be more because of the ubiquity of cameras.
Wow.
The People: “Thanks for putting out the fire!”
Also the People: “We’re going to light this town on fire!”
We should also have some kind of national level – though not necessarily government run – database for cops who are fired for bad actions that is easy to access and can be referred to in lawsuits down the line so that problem children don’t just move to a new state or different level of policing and start over.
Doctors and lawyers too, while we’re at it – in fact, any position where a has considerable power over b.