[Saeko]

[Donna]

Maybe, but how does he get the goods back either way?

No idea, I'd imagine just offering to give the fake bills back to him and refuse sale. I don't think George would have ran off with the goods in that situation, what may have happened is that the clerk told him the money was fake, that he needed to give the goods back and that they were going to keep the fake bill, and that probably escalated the entire situation. Or the clerk did all that and took the initiative of calling the police before George even knew what was going on. There's a lot of different ways racial bias can influence someone in that situation.

[Unthinking Majority]

I'm calling you names because you're a total garbage person and a racist concern troll.

So I'm a total garbage person and a racist and a troll because i'm pointing out that Floyd committed crimes and that he's responsible for his actions?

He had fentanyl in his system, so fucking what? Is this a segue for another shitty talking point that criminalizes addicts? Fuck you, cunt.

When you're losing an argument you lash out in anger and start with the profane name-calling and throwing tantrums. That's what toddlers do. Grow up.

Addiction isn't a crime. Possession/use of fentanyl and meth is, as is using counterfeit bills. I don't think small possession of those things should be legal, but they should be decriminalized. Until they are, ya they are crimes.

People are responsible for their actions. Do you know how you get addicted to fentanyl and meth in the first place? You make the decision to try it for the first time. I feel bad for the guy for being murdered and for having a life so shitty that he needs to take drugs to feel happy.

[Unthinking Majority]

@wat0n there is also the possibility that the store clerk exercised racial bias as well and made the assumption that Floyd must have been intentionally trying to pass counterfeit money, whereas had he been white the clerk (and the responding officers for that matter) might have given him the benefit of the doubt and presumed he acquired it accidentally.

Ya you think if it was a publicly intoxicated white guy the clerk would have thought he was an upstanding person and given him the benefit of the doubt? LOL.

[Hindsite]

In the USA you have freedom of speech, which means a person of colour can legally put up his middle finger to a police officer and tell him to go fuck himself and to eat his nuts, even while detained. This is a great example of how it's done. Warning, best to not assert your rights without video livestreaming it to Youtube so the evidence can't be confiscated and erased by cops:

That guy seems to be very proud of himself.

[Unthinking Majority]

Sorry, but are we supposed to presume that he was guilty of knowingly using counterfeit bills even though there is no evidence?

Also, it is logically inconsistent to argue that he was so intoxicated that it was a problem and simultaneously claim that he was carefully trying to commit a crime.

Being high on drugs isn't a legal excuse for committing a crime.

How any of this is something for which Mr. Floyd needed to be held “responsible” is beyond me, and seems completely irrelevant to the fact that the police killed him despite the lack of crime, violence, or resistance.

Floyd deserved to have the cops called on him and arrested. He didn't deserve to be killed. We don't know if he resisted or not because we don't have video from the time he was about to put in the cop car to the time he had the knee on his neck on the ground. We don't know why or how he ended up on the ground.

[Pants-of-dog]

Maybe but the Minneapolis Police Union condemned the conviction as well.

Yes, police unions always oppose keeping police accountable for brutality.

He could claim that he was trying to leave him unconscious. Second degree is not impossible, but I can see how he could get away from that charge. I don't think he has a good chance of getting away from third degree murder, and I am pretty sure a second degree manslaughter charge will stand.

If they knew each other though I find it harder for him to claim there was no intent to kill, as it's easier to claim that his state of mind was not that of a law enforcement member but that it was way more personal - making the second degree murder a lot easier to prove, and also makes first degree murder viable.

Why was the DA allowed to shirk their duty?

Precisely what you mention in the first paragraph is why this technique was improperly used (even if Floyd hadn't died), under MPD's own manual. And it's also why he'll have trouble getting away with this by shielding himself on his employer.

Agreed on the complaints as well. The MPD Will have to explain how it dealt with them, if it did at all.

The MPD is not changing its policy on this hold, though.

And this presumably allows cops who have complaints against them can continue to do what Mr. Floyd’s killer dis.

But it's particularly effective now that these killings are being filmed. Hence the conviction in the JD case - what else could the DA do once this became public?

It all depends on the election, prosecutors in urban areas - where Trump didn't perform particularly well - will have an incentive not to look racist since the voting population there is not particularly Trumpist.

Before what's happened since Memorial Day? I very, very much doubt it.

I doubt it. Most voters do not have enough of a memory or sympathy to vote out DAs for police brutality that happened more than a few days ago.

Why? You got the source, and actually it's not inconsistent with systemic racism either - why else would you or anyone else care about the race of jurors?

But since solving that involves changing community views on these matters, it's not as simple as blaming public officials and being done with it. Ultimately, it is the community's views themselves that need to change, and this is something that can and will happen as more footage becomes ever available.

Indeed, it's precisely because of footage that there have been protests ever since the mid 2010s (not counting Rodney King).

Maybe, and that's when State and Federal officials can also intervene. Furthermore, if racism is so widespread that you cannot find 13 randomly selected non-racist guys to serve as grand jurors, then it doesn't really matter whatever else you do: Unless you want to invade and occupy those American counties to impose your ideology and bring them democracy - in a similar manner to how Bush II gave "democracy" to Iraq - then it doesn't matter what laws you pass to stop it, they'll find a way around it.

However, I don't think racism is that widespread in this country and particularly not in large cities. I've lived here for long enough to tell that. And the fact that protests are largely taking place in those cities should be quite enlightening in this regard. You can't have it that a large percentage of the population is racist and yet at the same time that these protests enjoy a measure of widespread support.

Getting back to systemic racism and its effect in police killings and brutality:

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/ ... ce/553340/

The question that typically pops up when black people are killed by police is whether racism had anything to do with it. Many studies do show that racism plays a part in causing police to pull the trigger more quickly on black suspects. That’s usually because of the implicit racial biases of the individual police officer involved. Law enforcement officials often try to rule out racism by arguing that you can’t tell what’s in a officer’s heart when these killings happen.

But what a team of researchers at the Boston University School of Public Health recently endeavored to find out was whether the kind of racism that’s woven into laws and policies also informs racial disparities in police violence. Their findings were released in the paper, “The Relationship Between Structural Racism and Black-White Disparities in Fatal Police Shootings at the State Level,” which was recently published in the Journal of the National Medical Association.

For this study, a research group led by community health sciences professor Michael Siegel looked at data on fatal police shootings between 2013 and 2017 from the Mapping Police Violence database, and then ran that along five key indicators of systemic racism— racial segregation, incarceration rate gaps, educational attainment gaps, the economic disparity index, and employment disparity gaps—for each state. The worse that African Americans are doing on those five fronts compared to white people, the higher the state’s score on what the researchers call a “state racism index.” If a state scores high on those five factors, and also happens to have a high per capita rate of unarmed African Americans shot and killed by police, then structural racism serves as a worthy explanation for police violence in those states.

Siegel’s team controlled their analysis by considering other factors such as each state’s population size, non-homicide violent crime rate, household gun ownership, and proportion of population living in urban areas. They found that structural racism does positively correlate with higher levels of police killings of African Americans. For every ten-point increase in the state racism index there’s a corresponding 24 percent increase in the ratio of unarmed black people killed by police compared to white people killed in same conditions. This was true for the nation, when looking at state results in aggregate. Racial segregation was the most significant predictor among the five state racism index factors for this outcome.

....
Before this study there were two general schools of thought on racial disparities in police killings of unarmed black suspects: The threat hypothesis, which reflects the influence of racism on police interaction with African Americans, and the community violence hypothesis, which supposes that higher rates of violent crime in black neighborhoods might explain higher rates of police shootings of African Americans. Siegel’s study says both are contributors, but don’t totally explain the disparities.

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“Even when controlling for both the overall rate of Black police shootings and Black arrest rates,” reads the study, “structural racism was still a significant positive predictor of police shootings of unarmed Black suspects.”

The best state examples for seeing how structural racism might influence police violence against African Americans are Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois, which register the highest on the state racism index, and have some of the highest rates of unarmed African Americans shot by police. So, one might apply this study to see if explains the police killing of Dontre Hamilton, an unarmed African American who suffered from a mental disorder who police shot 14 times in 2014; or, the Facebook-lived police killing of Philando Castile in 2016, who was also unarmed when police shot him in an area outside of St. Paul, Minnesota. Or, you could look at any one of the hundreds of police killings that occurred in Chicago, Illinois over the past few years to see if the lessons of Siegel’s study applies.

No matter how these matters are reviewed, the racial disparities found in police violence can no longer be written off as a dispute over what was in a police officer’s heart when he or she pulled the trigger. There is now empirical data that shows that broader policies perpetuating racism must be considered, too.

I don't know if there are any precedents to that effect. Cities do seem to pay a lot of money in settlements.

Settlements and lawsuits do not stop police brutality. It just means that the taxpayer gets beaten by the cops then indirectly pays for it.

As for disarming and defunding the police, I think it depends on the city. I don't think that should be done when there's enough arms among gangs and other forms of organized crime as to make it hard for the police to keep them in check.

Part of the reason why they are heavily armed is because the population at large also has quite a lot of arms. Also there should probably be a broader reform such as legalizing most drugs but that's another matter, for another thread since it's a long one, even if it's related to policing.

Provide evidence for this claim that militarisation of police forces is due to a heavily armed population.

Then explain why these militarised police forces are not called on the white protesters carrying assault rifles.

Don't forget sexual assault by some civilians as well. But leaving that aside, it's a matter of numbers as usual. For Boston, all deaths were the result of the military and the volunteers also shot some looters. In Baltimore, a single looter was killed by a nonstriking cop. Care to explain your reasoning here?

I do not think you read the evidence correctly.

The employee(s) told him the bill was fake and requested him to return the purchase. The employee said he didn't pay attention to them and, in the employee's opinion, "was awfully drunk" and "not in control of himself". It seems there's footage of that interaction as well.

The 911 call was already quoted.

It does not mention Mr. Floyd doing anything criminal or violent, or showing any intent to do anything criminal or violent.

It also mentions that Mr. Floyd replied to the employee, saying that he did not wish to return to the store. Instead, Mr. Floyd waited for the police outside the store.

These are not the actions of a person who thinks they are committing a criminal activity.

That's actually what (for example) Jacksonville's DA was accused of doing in the Travyon Martin case

So the myth was based on a single accusation?

Why?

Why what?

@Unthinking Majority I would not assume there was criminal intent on his end either, just as @Donna said he could have inadvertently gotten it from elsewhere and paid with it. Even more if as you pointed out he wasn't sober. My point though is that it isn't about his state of mind, but about what would the store clerk be expected to do. What else should have he legally done but called the police? Fight a bouncer? Pull a weapon? Or what?

Again, the store is legally required to phone the police for all counterfeit money. Mr. Floyd’s actions had almost nothing to do with the call.

The store, incidentally, will no longer be calling the police when someone brings counterfeit money to the store, as the police presence is too dangerous for customers.

[Pants-of-dog]

Being high on drugs isn't a legal excuse for committing a crime.

That is irrelevant since Mr. Floyd committed no crime.

Please answer the question I asked:

Are we supposed to presume that he was guilty of knowingly using counterfeit bills even though there is no evidence?

Floyd deserved to have the cops called on him and arrested.

Why?

He committed no crime.

He didn't deserve to be killed. We don't know if he resisted or not because we don't have video from the time he was about to put in the cop car to the time he had the knee on his neck on the ground. We don't know why or how he ended up on the ground.

Yes, it is odd that the MPD has refused to release the bodycams of the four officers present.

But you are correct that there is no evidence that he resisted at all.

[Unthinking Majority]

Again, the store is legally required to phone the police for all counterfeit money. Mr. Floyd’s actions had almost nothing to do with the call.

They had everything to do with the call. He paid with counterfeit money.

That's also a ridiculous narrative. They went out and asked him to give back the merchandise and he wouldn't. If they only cared about following the law to report it they wouldn't have given a shit.

Anyone store owner with half a brain would call the cops if an intoxicated guy came in and paid with fake bills and wouldn't give the merch back.

I'm done with this whole convo.

[Hindsite]

Floyd deserved to have the cops called on him and arrested. He didn't deserve to be killed. We don't know if he resisted or not because we don't have video from the time he was about to put in the cop car to the time he had the knee on his neck on the ground. We don't know why or how he ended up on the ground.

i don't know for sure, but I heard Floyd resisted being put into the Police vehicle after he was already handcuffed. But still that does not excuse why he was being held on the ground with pressure on his neck and possibly on his back for so long after they knew he had passed out and was no threat to them. No matter what else happens, they have already been fired from their jobs and charged with crimes.

[Pants-of-dog]

They had everything to do with the call. He paid with counterfeit money.

Again, the store had a policy where they were required to call about all counterfeit money. It does not matter if George Floyd spent it there or if it had magically been teleported there by an Elf wizard from space.

Please answer the question I asked:

Are we supposed to presume that he was guilty of knowingly using counterfeit bills even though there is no evidence?

That's also a ridiculous narrative. They went out and asked him to give back the merchandise and he wouldn't. If they only cared about following the law to report it they wouldn't have given a shit.

He did not attempt to flee with the cigarettes. Instead, he sat on his car and waited.

Maybe he thought the cops would say the money was not counterfeit, or that they would just follow the laws and simply interview him about where the money came from. You did claim he was high, right?

More likely, he assumed this was a misunderstanding or even did not understand because he was stoned. And because he knew the store owner, he thought (correctly) that this was not a big deal.

Please answer the question I asked:

Are we supposed to presume that he was guilty of knowingly using counterfeit bills even though there is no evidence?

Anyone store owner with half a brain would call the cops if an intoxicated guy came in and paid with fake bills and wouldn't give the merch back.

I'm done with this whole convo.

No, the store owner has explicitly stated that he would not have called the cops on Mr. Floyd if he had been there. And he is changing the store policy so that the cops never get called for counterfeit money.
Please answer the question I asked:

Are we supposed to presume that he was guilty of knowingly using counterfeit bills even though there is no evidence?

[Unthinking Majority]

Please answer the question I asked:

Are we supposed to presume that he was guilty of knowingly using counterfeit bills even though there is no evidence?

You don't answer my questions, I ain't answering shit. What are you the cops?

[ness31]

Has the 911 call been posted in the thread? Or is just the transcript available?

[wat0n]

No idea, I'd imagine just offering to give the fake bills back to him and refuse sale. I don't think George would have ran off with the goods in that situation, what may have happened is that the clerk told him the money was fake, that he needed to give the goods back and that they were going to keep the fake bill, and that probably escalated the entire situation. Or the clerk did all that and took the initiative of calling the police before George even knew what was going on. There's a lot of different ways racial bias can influence someone in that situation.

There's a NYT video that you might find useful as it shows the clerks:

@Pants-of-dog might find it useful too as it also touches on MPD's policy, and @Hindsite can clearly see he didn't actively resist arrest - he was at most having a bad trip.

Yes, police unions always oppose keeping police accountable for brutality.

They do, but it also shows the DA in this case doesn't seem to be afraid of charging cops.

Why was the DA allowed to shirk their duty?

How do? The DA charged him, didn't he?

The MPD is not changing its policy on this hold, though.

And this presumably allows cops who have complaints against them can continue to do what Mr. Floyd’s killer dis.

When there's passive resistance? I highly doubt so. And I suspect that this will likely be removed from the policy as well.

I doubt it. Most voters do not have enough of a memory or sympathy to vote out DAs for police brutality that happened more than a few days ago.

I think this is a rather condescending view of the public, don't you think?

Getting back to systemic racism and its effect in police killings and brutality:

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/ ... ce/553340/

The question that typically pops up when black people are killed by police is whether racism had anything to do with it. Many studies do show that racism plays a part in causing police to pull the trigger more quickly on black suspects. That’s usually because of the implicit racial biases of the individual police officer involved. Law enforcement officials often try to rule out racism by arguing that you can’t tell what’s in a officer’s heart when these killings happen.

But what a team of researchers at the Boston University School of Public Health recently endeavored to find out was whether the kind of racism that’s woven into laws and policies also informs racial disparities in police violence. Their findings were released in the paper, “The Relationship Between Structural Racism and Black-White Disparities in Fatal Police Shootings at the State Level,” which was recently published in the Journal of the National Medical Association.

For this study, a research group led by community health sciences professor Michael Siegel looked at data on fatal police shootings between 2013 and 2017 from the Mapping Police Violence database, and then ran that along five key indicators of systemic racism— racial segregation, incarceration rate gaps, educational attainment gaps, the economic disparity index, and employment disparity gaps—for each state. The worse that African Americans are doing on those five fronts compared to white people, the higher the state’s score on what the researchers call a “state racism index.” If a state scores high on those five factors, and also happens to have a high per capita rate of unarmed African Americans shot and killed by police, then structural racism serves as a worthy explanation for police violence in those states.

Siegel’s team controlled their analysis by considering other factors such as each state’s population size, non-homicide violent crime rate, household gun ownership, and proportion of population living in urban areas. They found that structural racism does positively correlate with higher levels of police killings of African Americans. For every ten-point increase in the state racism index there’s a corresponding 24 percent increase in the ratio of unarmed black people killed by police compared to white people killed in same conditions. This was true for the nation, when looking at state results in aggregate. Racial segregation was the most significant predictor among the five state racism index factors for this outcome.

....
Before this study there were two general schools of thought on racial disparities in police killings of unarmed black suspects: The threat hypothesis, which reflects the influence of racism on police interaction with African Americans, and the community violence hypothesis, which supposes that higher rates of violent crime in black neighborhoods might explain higher rates of police shootings of African Americans. Siegel’s study says both are contributors, but don’t totally explain the disparities.

Cities are changing fast. Keep up with the CityLab Daily newsletter.
The best way to follow issues you care about.
Subscribe
“Even when controlling for both the overall rate of Black police shootings and Black arrest rates,” reads the study, “structural racism was still a significant positive predictor of police shootings of unarmed Black suspects.”

The best state examples for seeing how structural racism might influence police violence against African Americans are Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois, which register the highest on the state racism index, and have some of the highest rates of unarmed African Americans shot by police. So, one might apply this study to see if explains the police killing of Dontre Hamilton, an unarmed African American who suffered from a mental disorder who police shot 14 times in 2014; or, the Facebook-lived police killing of Philando Castile in 2016, who was also unarmed when police shot him in an area outside of St. Paul, Minnesota. Or, you could look at any one of the hundreds of police killings that occurred in Chicago, Illinois over the past few years to see if the lessons of Siegel’s study applies.

No matter how these matters are reviewed, the racial disparities found in police violence can no longer be written off as a dispute over what was in a police officer’s heart when he or she pulled the trigger. There is now empirical data that shows that broader policies perpetuating racism must be considered, too.

That's a rather weak way to conclude that "structural racism" is to blame here. We might as well take the same data and conclude it's structural poverty or socioeconomic segregation, for example, since they also affect African Americans more than Whites (I actually find this more persuasive too). Furthermore, the source on shootings (the Mapping Police Violence Project) also shows that police killings of unarmed people shows a downward trend for both Blacks and Whites - a time trend that they didn't consider in the paper for some reason. I wonder what would happen if one included a time fixed effects.

There's the Fryer paper based on looking at incidents themselves (including whether the suspect was armed for instance) that undermines this one as well.

Settlements and lawsuits do not stop police brutality. It just means that the taxpayer gets beaten by the cops then indirectly pays for it.

Indeed they are just part of what delivering justice consists of. But that wasn't my point: My point is that since you can sue the city or the PD, you can demand them to name whoever gave the illegal orders.

Provide evidence for this claim that militarisation of police forces is due to a heavily armed population.

Sure, it's as simple as reading the history of the militarization of policing in the US (and abroad for that matter) during the 20th century. So for instance the American police began to introduce automatic weapons as early as during the Great Depression.

Then explain why these militarised police forces are not called on the white protesters carrying assault rifles.

Who says they weren't being closely watched? They set a perimeter around the VA Capitol, and didn't let any armed people inside. A State of Emergency was also in place, and as I said a large police force was deployed.

Thankfully, the whole thing went peacefully, those carrying their guns didn't try to go into the Capitol and no repression was needed. They actually were more peaceful than the protests we've seen now.

I do not think you read the evidence correctly.

Why? Please do elaborate.

The 911 call was already quoted.

It does not mention Mr. Floyd doing anything criminal or violent, or showing any intent to do anything criminal or violent.

It also mentions that Mr. Floyd replied to the employee, saying that he did not wish to return to the store. Instead, Mr. Floyd waited for the police outside the store.

These are not the actions of a person who thinks they are committing a criminal activity.

But he didn't return the product, which is obviously something problematic for the clerks.

So the myth was based on a single accusation?

No, it's just an example of the overcharging issue. It will sometimes be used for plea bargaining or just to look tough, like in that case (she even charged a 12 year old for first degree murder of his 2 year old brother in what was at most manslaughter).

Why what?

Why don't bodycams help to address systemic racism by putting police brutality on the spotlight?

Again, the store is legally required to phone the police for all counterfeit money. Mr. Floyd’s actions had almost nothing to do with the call.

The store, incidentally, will no longer be calling the police when someone brings counterfeit money to the store, as the police presence is too dangerous for customers.

And the store clerks tried talking to him, as you should be able to see in the video above.

[Pants-of-dog]

You don't answer my questions, I ain't answering shit. What are you the cops?

I looked back over the last few pages and I reread our interactions. You asked me no questions, and I addressed all of your arguments.

But you are under no obligation to answer my questions.

Under presumption of innocence, we would heed to assume that Mr. Floyd was not knowingly carrying around counterfeit money.

[skinster]

[Unthinking Majority]

I looked back over the last few pages and I reread our interactions. You asked me no questions, and I addressed all of your arguments.

But you are under no obligation to answer my questions.

Weeks ago in the Youtube hate-speech thread u wouldn't answer my questions.

Under presumption of innocence, we would heed to assume that Mr. Floyd was not knowingly carrying around counterfeit money.[/quote]

He isn't guilty of anything unless a judge or jury decides. A cop detains, arrests, or fines, they don't convict, because they're 1000x dumber and less educated than lawyers and judges and don't know the law. I assume he'd be charged if he was murdered, then it's up to the courts.

Doesn't matter now, he's dead.

[Unthinking Majority]

double post.

[Pants-of-dog]

They do, but it also shows the DA in this case doesn't seem to be afraid of charging cops.

I assume that charging cops who are black and recent immigrants is a lot easier for the union to accept.

Because of systemic racism.

How do? The DA charged him, didn't he?

Not with the right charges. They, as I already showed, had set it up to get the murderer off the hook. And almost certainly colluded with the medical examiner.

Why has none of that been questioned?

When there's passive resistance? I highly doubt so. And I suspect that this will likely be removed from the policy as well.

But as it stands now, cops with a history of violence can use this, with the reasonable expectation that they will use it unwisely and unnecessarily risk the lives of citizens.

I think this is a rather condescending view of the public, don't you think?

The same public that elected Trump, re-elected Bush, and continues to ignore systemic racism?

That's a rather weak way to conclude that "structural racism" is to blame here. We might as well take the same data and conclude it's structural poverty or socioeconomic segregation, for example, since they also affect African Americans more than Whites (I actually find this more persuasive too). Furthermore, the source on shootings (the Mapping Police Violence Project) also shows that police killings of unarmed people shows a downward trend for both Blacks and Whites - a time trend that they didn't consider in the paper for some reason. I wonder what would happen if one included a time fixed effects.

There's the Fryer paper based on looking at incidents themselves (including whether the suspect was armed for instance) that undermines this one as well.

Structural poverty and socio-economic segregation are also probably correlated with structural racism.

And if there were a time effect, we would probably see that this sort of police impunity for killings and brutality would reduce over time as systemic racism also decreased.

I can not read NY Times articles usually, but since we are at the beginning of the month, I was able to read it. That study does not contradict the finding if this study at all.

Indeed they are just part of what delivering justice consists of. But that wasn't my point: My point is that since you can sue the city or the PD, you can demand them to name whoever gave the illegal orders.

Again, this assumes that you have evidence of illegal orders, which is so unlikely that it seems odd to use this as an argument.

Sure, it's as simple as reading the history of the militarization of policing in the US (and abroad for that matter) during the 20th century. So for instance the American police began to introduce automatic weapons as early as during the Great Depression.

How does this support the claim that militarisation is a reaction to an armed populace?

Who says they weren't being closely watched? They set a perimeter around the VA Capitol, and didn't let any armed people inside. A State of Emergency was also in place, and as I said a large police force was deployed.

Thankfully, the whole thing went peacefully, those carrying their guns didn't try to go into the Capitol and no repression was needed. They actually were more peaceful than the protests we've seen now.

So, they were able to address the demands of a heavily armed protest without using police brutality or their military hardware.

But they cannot do that with peaceful unarmed protesters.

Why? Please do elaborate.

At this point, I think people can read it for themselves.

And if anyone needs further evidence of why cops need to be disarmed and defunded, just watch the news.

But he didn't return the product, which is obviously something problematic for the clerks.

Are we now calling police because retail staff are annoyed at how a customer behaves? Is that the argument?

Why don't bodycams help to address systemic racism by putting police brutality on the spotlight?

Because police brutality is often an example of individual racism. Systemic racism occurs in more discreet ways, like police unions refusing to recognise and deal with individual racism in their ranks, to the extent that individual racists actually get institutional support.

And the store clerks tried talking to him, as you should be able to see in the video above.

Yes, and that does not matter.

Mr. Floyd had the cops called on him despite not doing anything illegal or violent, or threatening to do anything violent or criminal.

[skinster]

This is not an Aberration; Violence is Central to the History, and Present, of the United States
There is a widespread assumption that the violence and destruction witnessed over the last week are an aberration to the American experience. Countless headlines and social media posts, written in response to the latest onslaught of violence unleashed by the police against protesters, have employed a similar framing, which is roughly as follows: you think this is a miscellaneous non-Western state? Well, surprise, it’s America! Despite its pervasiveness, the notion that violence committed against its own citizens is what other, ostensibly less civilised non-Western nations do – not the ‘democracy’ of America – is a racist and ahistorical position that serves to conceal an almost unbroken line of violence against ‘its own people’ and countless others around the world since the US’ inception.

The negative comparisons with other countries, such as Iran, Venezuela, and the DPRK – nations deemed official enemies of the US, as though the US has stooped down to a lower moral plane through its recent actions, serve to perpetuate racist and chauvinistic myths about a once righteous US that never existed. As Samir Amin has argued in The American Ideology, even its supposedly virtuous revolution was in fact only a limited war of independence devoid of any social dimension, that carried out genocide against the Native Americans and never challenged slavery.

For many, the protests and police violence of the last week have vividly evoked the revolutionary era of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A period in which, galvanised by the Black Panther Party (BPP) and other organisations inspired by and linked to it, there was a sustained period of urban unrest throughout the US. These uprisings were crushed with overwhelming force by the country’s intelligence services, police, army and other paramilitary forces. One of the most infamous incidents of the period was the attack on a pro-BPP, anti-Vietnam war protest at Kent State University in 1970, in which National Guard members indiscriminately shot and bayoneted student protesters, killing four and injuring many more. Many of the troops that suppressed protests at Kent State, Yale and other universities all over the US in this period had been explicitly told by their officers that ‘you will not be successfully prosecuted if you shoot someone while performing a duty’. In short, they had been given a license to kill. And used it.

Fifty years later, it is almost certain those National Guard troops – who are currently being sent to occupy the streets of multiple American cities – have received similar assurances from their superiors, foremost amongst which is their Commander-in-Chief, Donald Trump, who has not only justified but also explicitly called for lethal violence against protesters. However despicable those infamous killings at Kent State were, what is important to understand is that they are illustrative of the manner with which the US state – be it led by a Democrat or Republican administration – habitually deals with its citizens who dare to resist it.

The Kent State murders were not exceptional. In fact, this particular incident received the level of attention it has because the victims were white college students. Many comparable incidents throughout US history, where the victims were black, have been erased from the mainstream historical record. Destruction of black lives and property on an even larger scale, such as the annihilation of ‘Black Wall Street’ in Greenwood, Tulsa in 1921 when over 300 of its black inhabitants were killed, is similarly suppressed from popular memory.

The treatment meted out by US state and its actors upon black protesters and revolutionaries has been unremittingly brutal. The 1969 murder of the BPP youth leader, Fred Hampton, is indicative of the state’s ruthlessness when it deals with the threat posed by such inspirational leaders, who, notably in the case of Hampton, called for unity between races in the name of a proletarian revolution against capitalism and the US state. At just 21 years old, Hampton was drugged by an FBI infiltrator and then, while comatose in bed, executed by members of the Chicago Police Department through multiple gunshots to the head. Such callous state violence against prominent leaders who are deemed capable of uniting the black American masses against the state remains commonplace to this day. The fate of several of those individuals who led the protests in Ferguson in 2014 is testament to this continuity.

During the late 1960s in particular, the FBI genuinely feared that such a unifying leader, a black ‘messiah’, could bring about ‘a real “Mau Mau” in America, the beginning of a true black revolution’. Indeed, just one week before Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination in 1968, the FBI had cited him, alongside Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), as prime contenders to assume such a position. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X must be understood as part of a much broader wave of violence, intimidation, sabotage and repression focussed against the Black Nationalist movement and its allies, most notably by the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign (originally directed against the US Communist Party). The US state was so determined to crush any and all internal resistance that, in the words of one US general, if the uprisings did not die down as the 1970s progressed, the Pentagon was ready to turn American cities into ‘scenes of destruction approaching those of Stalingrad during World War II’. That willingness to use indiscriminate violence to crush internal uprisings has never dissipated, as the events in LA in 1992, Ferguson in 2014, Standing Rock in 2016-17 and nation-wide over the past week have made transparent.

There is a further layer of offense to the propensity of many Americans to only comprehend this recent wave of violence as though the US is temporarily acting like other implicitly ‘worse’ countries and that it should really be happening somewhere else like Caracas, Baghdad or Beirut. These ‘bad’ examples are frequently associated with violence in the mind of an average American as a consequence of the very same factor that now threatens US cities: the unceasing brutality of the US state. Beirut especially has become a lazy by-word for chaotic urban violence to many Americans of a certain age as a result of its civil war, and especially the 1980s period of that conflict, when a number of American citizens were kidnapped and some killed. But what is forgotten is that US marines were occupying Lebanon at the time; that the US was directly involved in sparking and sustaining the civil war itself; and that the US is responsible for some of its worst violence, including the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila.

As so many of those slain black revolutionaries understood all too well, there is a direct link between the daily racist violence inflicted upon them and their fellow black Americans and the violence the US military inflicted against civilians in Vietnam and elsewhere overseas; it is the intrinsic and ongoing link between racism, capitalism and imperialism. As the BPP revolutionary George Jackson – himself murdered by the state in San Quentin Prison in 1971 – wrote to Angela Davis a year before he was killed: ‘it’s no coincidence that Malcolm X and MLK died when they did ... remember what was on his [X’s] lips when he died. Vietnam and economics, political economy’. X had explicitly stated: ‘you can’t have capitalism without racism. And if you find a person without racism ... and they have a philosophy that makes you sure they don’t have this racism in their outlook, usually they’re socialists’. At this point he had begun working with the governments of a number of recently independent African countries, many of them socialist, to pass a UN resolution condemning the US as a colonial power for its treatment of its black citizens. This proposal ‘terrified the American power elite’ and X was eliminated before he could proceed with it.

In Blood in My Eye, a book which Jackson heroically managed to finish in prison shortly before he was murdered as well, he wrote:

The US has established itself as the mortal enemy of all people’s governments, all scientific-socialist mobilization of consciousness everywhere on the globe, all anti-imperialist activity on earth. The history of this country in the last fifty years or more, the very nature of all its fundamental elements, and its economic, social, political and military mobilization distinguish it as the prototype of the international fascist counterrevolution.

Jackson’s observation has only proven to be more accurate in the intervening half century. Therefore, in addition to their solidarity with the righteous cause of black Americans, it is for this reason, too, the eyes of many millions all over the world are now focussed so intensely on events in the US. Anything that has the capacity to weaken the US internally serves to strengthen the position and revolutionary potential of all progressive forces everywhere in the world. Jackson wrote at length about the potentially global significance of a revolution led by what he termed the US’ ‘black colony’ – a concern shared by the US state. As revealed by Maurice Bishop, one of the State Department’s primary fears concerning the Marxist-Leninist revolution in the small Caribbean island of Grenada in the early 1980s, was the fact that that its leadership and 95 percent of the country’s people were black, and therefore it could have ‘a dangerous appeal to 30 million black people in the United States’. This was deemed unacceptable and in 1983, after years of other means of sabotage against it, the US military invaded Grenada and swiftly crushed its short-lived revolutionary process.

Contrary to the blatantly racist notion that this ‘great nation’ should not lower itself to the standards of its enemies, it must be stated plainly that the US is in fact the global expert on assassinations, crushing internal dissent, controlling and intimidating the media and various acts of mass violence against protesters and opposition groups – all the very things that many people are now absurdly claiming to be ‘un-American’. The events of the past week have demonstrated this clearly. What remained of the superficial mask of American liberalism has – at least for now – dropped entirely, exposing the ugly fascism at its core.

In the days and weeks to come, many people – including some on the left – will scramble to pull that mask back up. Reforms, they will say, can address this problem, thereby implying the US remains a redeemable democracy morally superior to its enemies. But the reality is that the US is what it routinely accuses its enemies of being: an authoritarian, militarised police state that surveils, brutalises, imprisons and murders people at home and abroad with impunity – all in the service of the interests of its capitalist oligarchy, which lays claim to everything, everywhere.
https://www.ebb-magazine.com/essays/thi ... aberration