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Minneapolis Mess
It seems to me the current mess in Minneapolis is just one more drop in the bucket that the police are the enemy of the people in that city. Apparently, they shoot you if you call 911, and they will suffocate you if you get arrested. And now, they cannot stop rioting.
So basically, they are so incompetent that they kill you if you are a law-abiding citizen who encounters them, but the let you run rampant if you are a looter. They sure are not going to protect your business.
We are a far, far way away from when the police where people to be trusted, especially in Minneapolis.
Published in General
For the life of me, I can’t figure out what stealing five flatscreens from Target has to do with police brutality.
I totally agree. But it is clear, when it comes to killing one person, this police depart has that down well. When it comes to stopping a riot? Not so much.
That’s a Democrat town, ain’t it? Ilhan Omar’s district.
There’s something doubly ironic about protesting against police brutality in a place called “Target”.
And no doubt they’ll prosecute you if you do, because you’re not supposed to be doing the job of the police . . .
If the police did more to catch the looters and the court system did more to lock them up, the police may have more opportunity to trust the ones left out and treat them without so much suspicion.
This should be a tactical moment to remove the toxic people from the community.
Doesn’t the arrow go the other direction? The police are given huge powers, and they’re paid by the taxpayers. Whether they trust the citizenry is not the issue. The issue is whether the citizenry trusts them.
Believe me, I don’t underestimate the value of prison for removing certain cultural “super-spreaders” from circulation. And maybe politics or something else is preventing the police doing that. That’s a shame, if it’s true.
But here’s the point. The video looks bad. If it is what it looks like — and we’ve been burned before, so maybe it isn’t — the cop will be at fault. Saying, “There’s just so many law-breakers out there and I was suspicious of him!” will not be a defense in either a legal or moral sense. Cops must do better.
Something to understand about the knee (or foot) on the neck of the guy down on the ground is that it happens every day. I personally witnessed it more than once while living in NYC. And virtually every single guy says he can’t breathe. Based on the video, either there was no crime committed or there are a thousand such every day.
And before you decide the answer is a thousand, stop and remember the comments above where people want the cops to be able to stop riots and looting.
Well, it’s a lot easier to watch police brutality on 60 inch flat screens than on that crappy little iPhone which you boosted on the same “shopping” trip. You deserve to get the best outrage experience!! And if you get 5 of them you can simultaneously be outraged on CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, and MSNBC all at the same time. Five times the outrage for the same investment of time. That’s efficiency baby!
Yet another killing by a police officer in yet another blue state’s blue city, proving the racism of red states. The rioting, arson, and looting may result in yet another “food desert,” which will, once again, prove the inherent racism of free markets as evil corporations redline yet another minority area.
Take a look at @dougwatt‘s post, When the Fight is Over It’s Over. Doug argues that once a suspect is no longer resisting and in cuffs, he should be placed in the squad car. In Doug’s opinion, the officer in question “froze,” at which point the other officers should have taken charge, and gotten the suspect up and in the car.
Powerline has good coverage of the riots and looting, drawing on this Twitter feed:
The cost of this low income housing project just went up:
Kyle Hooten’s coverage is also here:
Tweets by AlphaNewsMN
So when the guy dies that’s just tough luck? (I’m willing to hold out the possibility that there’s more to this story, as there often is.)
Your link between this event and stopping riots is 180 degrees backwards. The police need, ya know, not fatal ways of subduing and detaining suspects, including rioters. People need to know that surrendering to the police is not a death sentence. This is basic economics. One reason not to impose the death penalty for, say, robbery is that you obviate the incentive for robbers not to kill their victims.
A better link is no-knock warrants. When the police break in and shoot the dogs, they increase the probability of resistance. What’s a citizen supposed to do?
Sorry, no. They have to do better.
The mayor of Minneapolis is reading his scripted lines well. He calls for “peace” in what the Star Tribune refers to as “protests.” That’s the call; the response which that prompts is of course “no justice, no peace.”
Ilhan Omar urgers the “protestors” to “protect each other.”
She is correct that anger over Floyd’s death is justified.
If rioting can be framed to make Trump look bad, there will be more riots. If riot control leads to incidents that can be framed to make Trump look bad, there will be more riots.
The Left and its social media and old media collaborators want Trump out by any means necessary.
If you read what I wrote there, you might note that I said it’s likely happening thousands of times per day. And then once every several years one person dies. That *is* the not fatal way. The record for non-lethal rounds, a.k.a. rubber bullets doesn’t come close.
I can’t tell if you’re being obtuse or what. This “non-fatal” way killed the guy, so, not so non-fatal, after all.
The fact that the “non-fatal” approach results in a death only every once in a while doesn’t really cut it with me. It’s not like this was some freak thing where the guy had a heart attack or whatever. (From what I know.) The cop suffocated him. Have you read the other comments? Including comments by police officers wondering why the guy was kept on the ground so long, wasn’t put into the car, wasn’t zip-tied, why no one else stepped in, etc.?
I assume your reference to rubber bullets relates to the rioters, not the arrest. Are you saying that there are no non-lethal means for police to break up a riot — they have to one-by-one kneel on each rioter’s neck?
Fatal about one of a million times. That is a lower rate than any non-lethal tactic you can name.
I’m saying there are no non-lethal means, if your standard for non-lethal is that no one ever dies. Check into the statistics on children drowning in five gallon buckets. Far more lethal than this tactic (dozens of deaths per year), but still low enough that we accept it. I guess we just don’t care about children. Or, we’ve made the calculation that having those deaths out of hundreds of millions of uses of such buckets is low enough to be effectively insignificant.
I haven’t seen the video. How long was the officer on top of the guy? Five minutes? Eight minutes? While three others were present? Does this really happen that much?
The most memorable that I saw involved a guy caught at the top of a staircase inside a subway station, meaning he was already below ground. It was rush hour, and the cops were waiting for traffic to thin before trying to take him up multiple flights of stairs to the street. In the meantime, there was a cop standing on his neck.
I think the question here is not so much the action but the length of the action.
Oh? How about this tactic: subdue the suspect, then after he’s constrained get him off the ground. How does that one stack up?
Are you saying this was a freak accident, like drowning in a five-gallon bucket? Come on, man. The cop suffocated him. (It appears.) If we take all million of the knee-on-neck incidents, I’ll bet you any amount you care to mention that the fatality rate will be higher in cases where the cop continues to hold the suspect down even after he’s been subdued. You’re lumping in non-kind examples to increase the denominator. Why not go whole hog: there are probably billions of accumulated interactions between police and citizens (traffic tickets, lemonade-stand shutdowns, pickup basketball games, asking for directions), from which the fatality rate is indistinguishable from zero. You could make your case even better!
tl;dr The problem is not the knee-on-neck. It’s the continued knee-on-neck. (Based on what I know.)
I’m not suggesting the proper fatality rate for arrests is zero. I’m saying fatalities from arrests where the cops appear to do stupid things are not random, bad-luck events and that we should expect better from people to whom we give such insanely large power.
Not pretending to be any sort of expert on it. The one and only point I was making is that the tactic you saw in the video is not the slightest bit unusual.
OK, we’re delving in semantics here and I understand your point. My reaction is that the length for which a tactic is used becomes the tactic, which makes this (I think) unusual.
Actually, you’re making my point. It is not indistinguishable from zero; it is absolutely non-zero. But we still have cops arrest people.
I saw the video and understand the policeman kept his knee on him even after the guy was handcuffed. What I haven’t seen or heard is what did the guy do that the police felt the need to arrest him in the first place.
Quite sure that it was passing, or being in possession of, a counterfeit bill. How, and to what extent, things deteriorated immediately after that, I’m not sure.
The police had received a complaint of someone trying to pass a bad check, and he matched the description given by the complainant.
I thought Tasers were supposed to take care of this . . .